


Into The Meadow's Dawn

by HappyPrincess



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Actually: Ex-Friends to Friends with benefits to Lovers, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Blood Drinking, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Girl Direction, Harry struggles with drinking blood, Hurt/Comfort, Nymph Louis, Pining, Romance, Slow Burn, Struggles with Eating, Vampire Harry, but that could be triggering so pls be careful, can't believe i forgot that tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 10:05:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15861462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HappyPrincess/pseuds/HappyPrincess
Summary: But it is noon and the clouds are sweeping across the sky, a breeze making the ride home pleasant and the short walk from the station bearable. And upon opening the box a white, inconspicuous letter has plunked to the floor. And the reason for Harry sinking against the cool walls is not drunkenness or exhaustion from work or a sneaking wariness of life, no. It’s the sending address. There is none. Just a name. In scrawny writing.Love, Louisis what she zeroes in first.Love, Louis.A sob forms in her throat. She will be back, it says, Louis will be back. On the second of June. Waiting in front of the French café they used to work in during the late eighties, at midday, if it still stands, it says. If not, she will be waiting anyway, it says.Or: It's been three decades since Harry had last seen Louis. She hasn't been coping too well, with being alone in a city that used to be their home, with taking care of herself, with finding her purpose in the world. It's summer now and the flowers are blooming all around her, throwing her back into memories she'd rather keep locked away. Of course, this is when the letter arrives.





	Into The Meadow's Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!  
> First and foremost I have to thank felix / @louhearted for not only beta-ing this fic with passion, kindness and INCREDIBLE talent but also for being an absolute icon of a friend. I'm in awe with him every day, and so, so grateful for having him in my life. But he knows that. I love you, Sunshine! 
> 
>  
> 
> A massive thank you™ to everyone reading this. I know the vampire trope is a bit stale but I hope I created an interesting twist in worldbuilding. I especially hope the usual power imbalance that comes with vampire/human fics is avoided since Louis is a nymph and magical herself. (which was the most exciting thing to write tbh) But if you should detect any unhealthy interactings, please do tell me so i can change that asap!
> 
>  
> 
> WARNINGS:  
> Because these are people who've lived for decades and were shaped by them there's a short mention of the AIDS crisis, mentioning of past deaths (no one affiliated with H&L), mentioning of the world wars and a few sentences regarding trauma from them.  
> And some blood / blood drinking, obviously. As tagged: General struggles with drinking blood. There's a hospital scene because a side character reacts badly to blood + their struggle is pretty essential to the plot!  
> Also, a short mention of the d slur. (reclaimed and self-imposed)
> 
> Fun Facts:  
> \- Every flower in this is mentioned because of its meaning. So if you wanna... Look up some flower language :^)  
> \- All names that aren't 1d are actual sapphic women who lived in Paris during the 1920s  
> \- Oscar Wilde references all around because DUH.

-*-

 

Orange light bleeds into dusty cement, seeps into the cracks that unfurl like vines. There’s a blinking LED lamp in line with her throat, searing its anxious shine into her eyes and dizzying her mind. Between the open metal doors irregular patches and holes are dark shadows in the wall, but through the gap at the level of her knees a breeze of warm summer air presses her jeans to her calves, sweat soaking through the fabric. Even after repeatedly hitting several buttons on the sleek screen - fingers adding to the smudged prints - nothing but a weak little rumble occurs. She’s stuck between the open street and the ceiling of the ground floor, cars rushing past her just metres away and a dozen storeys above her, muffled sounds of hundreds and hundreds of busy feet winding down into her ears. A whole building sits on top of her, her own office lost among identical ones, the terrace on the roof with its open air and fake grass only a weak incitement in her mind.

Harry turns around with a groan and kicks the paned wall of the elevator. 

  
A little crack in the glass triples the reflections of the weeds bursting through the gaps in the pavement, lone specks of green amidst the stone. She stares at the replicas for numerous seconds before crouching down, avoids hitting her head on the cement, and lets herself down slowly. It doesn’t strain the muscles in her arms, of course, but it alarms the instincts that want to clutch onto control of her own body. The tip of her shoes barely touch the ground before she loses her grip and falls to her knees, a sharp pain ringing through her bones. There she is, sitting on her haunches in front of her work, tiny cobbles digging into the palms of her hands. They stick to her pants once she tries to wipe them off on her thigh, most likely waiting to dig into her skin every time she reaches for her phone during the day.

She stands up with a long sigh, desperately looking around to see if anyone saw her during this humiliating manoeuvre. On the other side of the street is the café she has frequently drank tea at but the windows reflect the sun in such manner that makes it impossible to discern any faces inside. In the corner of her vision she can still see the orange light flashing frantically. Someone else will have to deal with that. For now, she turns to her right, ignoring the stares of children gathered by a bench. It’s only a few steps along the building to get to the drive way leading to the back entrance. She forces open the gate, rings the bell and waits for someone to let her in.

She’ll have to take the stairs.

 

-*-

 

As a matter of fact, the cobbles do scratch up her hands every time she goes to look at her phone, but other than that work is nothing but the usual. Approximately the same amount of E-mails await a hasty reply, phone calls get answered while bobbing up and down in her fancy chair, lunch is spend with a sleep-tired Niall and an even more sleep-tired Zayn who keeps nodding off on her girlfriend’s shoulder.

“Can’t believe this type isn’t working either, at this rate we’ll have to pay for some special blend to make you fucking function during the day,” Niall says, fork forcefully digging into neatly arranged chips.

“Might be better, you know.” Harry inspects the scrape by her thumb and, before it can heal, experimentally brings it up to have a taste. Still as bland as in 1894. “You need less to get you through the day. And you have control over what they put in there.”

“It’s fucking expensive, though. Until we don’t know for sure that all types won’t work we can’t order a starter pack.”

Zayn, forehead pressed to Niall’s neck, mumbles: “Shouldn’t’ve remodelled the kitchen.”

“Shouldn’t’ve moved to this fucking country. Not even covering the blood cost, fuck kind of social security is that?”

Behind her the skyline reaches towards the blue sky, blue colour of the horizon almost faded in the stifling heat. On the rooftops the air is flickering, satellite dishes covered in thick layers of dust and fumes; since the mid of may a sticky blanket has draped itself over the city – slowing down bodies, traffic, and increasing the costs of transportation for synthetic blood. They’ve improved various mixtures over the last decades but still haven’t come up with a satisfying resolution to make it as mimetic as possible without congealing in mere minutes. 

Harry studies her healed hands. She should cut her nails. “You can have some of mine until you’re settled?”

Niall doesn’t answer, but the furrow between her brows deepens and her heartbeat increases. She’s always had a thing about aid. Zayn, with seemingly all the energy left in her body, lifts her head, one side of her braid now unruly and dishevelled. “Can you even spare a bottle? With the rent, ‘n all?”

She coughs. “I, uh, haven’t thought about that yet.”

“I’m not taking any. Not if that means you’ll have to cut back.”

“Fuck, a bottle won’t hurt me. I’d rather go a bit drowsy for a week than seeing you faint on the way up the stairs.”

“That fucking elevator…”

They all groan quietly, Niall going back to stabbing her chips and salad, Zayn staring forlornly at the two bowls of pudding they always get and never eat, lonely Panna Cotta wiggling under the sunlight. Really, the cafeteria on the roof may have been a factor as to why Harry applied for this job in the first place but they won’t even put out sunshades. When it’s raining they either have to gather crammed up by the counter or sit on the stairs leading up here. 

It’s fun though, the job. Mostly. Not as fun as the one she had in previous decades but definitely not as exhausting as the one she had in the fifties. Or those very few months in the early forties.

Harry swallows down an aching pain in her throat, dissolves the image of wide eyes and tender painted expressions and sirens and a warm body pressed against hers in hope of blocking out the convulsions of the earth beneath them as the buildings in their tiny town jerked and jumbled. That time is over. They worked through that. Together, and separately. They are both safe.

“I want to help you,” she whispers, so quietly non-vampire ears can’t discern it, “at least until you’re okay again.”

Zayn doesn’t react. Niall’s plate is empty, and thus they begin to shuffle back, as always apologising profoundly to the staff for not eating the dessert, as always avoiding the glances of their colleagues, sidestepping the elevator for the fourth time this month, as always complaining about the plain walls in the staircase.

Just before Harry has to turn a corner, Zayn bends down to fiddle with her shoelaces, braids slipping over her back, breathing out: “Thank you.”

All three of them hug good-bye for the day. They get off at different times, Harry staying until the evening, and the pair taking home the tube in a couple of hours.

The relief of being able to help Zayn is enough distraction from the constriction in her chest, enough of a crutch to bear the weight of the unknown, and to make polite conversation with people on the other side of the wire. She has agency in this city. She has purpose, no matter how small it is. The people around her are mostly healthy, they have striving relationships, they are safe in their homes and in their minds. The world has changed and people have changed, and she had watched and observed.

The thing is, Harry thinks after closing up and slowly descending the stairs, the thing is, she doesn’t actually know if Louis is safe.

 

 

 

-*-

 

 

Harry grew up Christian. Not at all surprising in rural England during the late 1890s, but noteworthy among the Vampire community currently living in the city. She knows of one priest that openly invites Vampires to mass and there is a bimonthly group meet-up for religious non-humans somewhere but she has never bothered to look up either of those. Mostly, her faith has waned over the decades. She is not one of those Vampires that have travelled the world and seen all kinds of wondrous and horrifying things, but even before meeting Louis and learning about the origin of Nymphs, her life had been agitating enough for her to begin to doubt. Paris in between the wars had played a huge factor, too. And falling in love for the first time.

Every now and then she’ll take a walk down the block to pause at the church marking the intersection between the local park and the adjoining hipster neighbourhood. On one side of the building, with its gothic influences and its white façade, a public square hosts fancy burger restaurants, vintage shops and a tattoo studio. On the other, the church tower throws a long shadow across oaks, beeches, and chestnut trees, people mingling on picnic blankets and children running through the bushes. After leaning against a traffic light and listening to the bells churn, she almost always ends up in the park, strolling through the paths and avoiding the open. Rarely, she takes the other direction, those restaurants may have a dozen veggy options but none of them serve blood. And a visit to the tattoo studious would have to evolve into daily visits if she really wanted that ink to stay.

Not once has she been inside the church.

If truth be told, she hasn’t been inside a church since the late eighties. Because even noticing it in the corner of her vision has memories swelling up in her, memories of weddings, of mass, of funerals. Too many funerals. And thinking of those, all those lost souls, always inevitably ends with memories of another soul she had lost, not because of death but because of her own carelessness, her own stupor.

Churches evoke memories she’d rather keep locked away.

Except that memories have a steady little habit of clinging to smells, too, not just to buildings, and vampires have a steady little habit of being extremely over-sensitive to exactly those. There are the obvious things such as walking along the city parks and getting hit with the scents of thousands and thousands of plants, or spending the evening at Niall’s and Zayn’s over a table of freshly cut flowers, or receiving yet another bouquet of pretty but meaningless blossoms for her birthday. Or, and those are the worst ones, having to drive out into the country during New Years to avoid the smell of burning sulphate and sulphur, the smell that catapults her back into the forties when all they could do was keep helping, keep hoping, keep holding on. And then there are the excruciating minutes of waiting in line at the bakery and swimming in memories of the years the both of them worked behind the counter at a confectionary, or making pasta at home and remembering those three weeks in Florence, or simply buying the wrong laundry detergent and having to endure the knowledge that its fragrance would clash horribly with Louis’.

So Harry had moved out of the house she had been barely living in, and came back to the city Louis and her lived in for almost a decade. It seemed like a healthy option at the time.

 

 

-*-

 

 

The next day, Zayn’s skin flakes in the sun. It’s barely noticeable even for Harry, but every time she rubs the circles under her eyes small particles stain her fingertips. Behind those sunglasses her irises have probably turned red.

Harry catches her arm just after lunch and before they inevitably split up, Niall’s forehead wrinkling as she pulls the bottle from her bag. Its paper label promises an organic blend, curving letters declaring it completely vegan. Zayn’s muscles seize up.

“One gets me through a week, uhm, if I’m careful.” Harry stares at the navy carpet, dirty from hundreds of feet, vacuum patterns capturing her attention. “And I mix it with something. I, uh, mostly blend it in with some berries, ‘n stuff.”  
A week is generous. Five days are probable, if she can save energy and avoid public spaces. But after months of testing different blood types and suffering the effects of those that don’t fit, Zayn will probably feel re-born with the first mouthful.

Her shaking hands struggle to open the cap, and Niall, lips now set in a straight line, helps her gently, holds it up to her mouth. They watch as Zayn’s fangs extract, almost making it impossible to take a sip, her whole body transforming from weakened and shaken into tense and desperate upon the smell of the blood. It visibly takes her great effort to close the cap again.

“Thank you,” she says, words distorted by her fangs and a strain to her voice. “I owe you.”

“No you fucking don't,” Harry spits out, shouldering her bag again. The day she’ll demand something for helping her friends will be a very bleak day.

“I’d be sick at home if it wasn’t for you. Fuck, let me thank you.”

“You can thank me by trying to find a fitting type, yeah? Or thinking about investing in a special blend.”

Zayn nods, squeezing her hand. “I will. Thank you.”

Niall wordlessly takes the bottle from her, and doesn’t look at Harry until they hug good-bye. 

 

 

-*-

 

 

Liam is the only one of her friends who likes to go clubbing with her, never turning down an invitation to get drunk and embarrass themselves. In the nine months they’ve known each other, they’ve annoyed Harry’s neighbours more often than in the years before, stumbling up the stairs giggling loudly and accidentally dropping things with great gusto. The old human couple on the first floor - that she visits once a month bearing banana bread - has had to see her in states of mind and body that she’d rather have them forget. But the whole matter reminds her of those carefree years in Paris, being flaunted around by salon hostesses, sipping expensive liquor and kissing girls in carriages. It reminds her of meeting Louis at the end of a wild evening, drunk to the point of willingly giving up her clothes, hopping around in circles pretending to be mistresses of Sappho.

“Do ya think I can find my soulmate in there?” Liam asks and looks at the bulk of people dancing to flashy music, one body swaying to the voice of a girl band. It’s nineties charts night in their favourite club, the usual clientele of straight middle-aged humans replaced by gay humans and non-humans alike. Harry pushes away the pain of not having experienced the beginning of the nineties in full consciousness, of hosting no memories of dancing to Destiny’s Child prior to 2000, and contemplates her answer.

“Do you really want to find your soulmate in a club?”

“I don’t care where I find my soulmate, could be a public restroom for all I care.”

Their buzzed head gleams blue in the lights. Harry ruffles through it, humming and pouting exaggeratedly.  “Are you lonely? Do you need someone to cuddle?”

She gets a flash of Liam’s grin before she’s being suffocated in a crushing hug, two muscly arms squeezing a shriek out of her. “I have you to cuddle, don’t I! I just want someone to fuck, too.”

Harry snorts: “We could always try that, you know.”

“And have a horrible re-make of that awful kiss? I thought I wasn’t the only one scarred for life after that.” Liam smacks their lips to her cheek.

“Hey,” she draws out, pouting earnestly now. “It wasn’t that bad. I’m a great kisser, we were just sad and stupid.”

They’re standing by a dip in the ground, few steps behind them leading to an area with small tables and uncomfortable benches, animated chatter reaching their ears. Someone is shouting about wanting to hide a comet. “I’m still sad and stupid, but -. Let’s not do that again.”

She sighs. “I know, you’re right. I just really _feel_ your need to find someone to sleep with.”

Liam looks pained, flickering lights illuminating their lowered brows and straightening lips. “I’ve… you know, been back to the place. Where we met. ‘S still the same. But it always leaves me... gagging for it. Can’t believe you seriously can just stand there and watch.”

The beat changes, and suddenly people start grinding on each other, kissing, touching each other’s sticky bodies. It’s perfectly fitting for Liam’s choice of topic, almost rivalling the excessive temptations the very venue they’re talking about takes up in her mind. Only that the music would be entirely different and the décor decidedly posher. The plain, plastered walls seem dull and sleazy, the linoleum floor littered with stains of alcohol and other substances omits a sour odour. With disgust, Harry realises the air is filled with a steam carrying the stench of sweat, oily snacks and plain salt for tequila shots. “Why are you doing this?”

“I was desperate! And, shit, I know there’s still an unspoken rule in vampire circles not to talk about it, but I frigging miss the taste of fresh blood every day. Sue me, if I wanna have that once in a while.”

“You’re so young,” Harry smiles despite the desire gnawing at her throat. “But I wasn’t reprimanding you for going there, I was whining about you bringing it up _here_. Among such a… distasteful environment.”

Liam laughs, strain still audible in their tone but cheeky glint back in their dark eyes. “You’re such a Victorian.”

“I’m more of an Edwardian, I’d say, but I know you young people don’t really keep up with royalty.”

“Down with the crown,” Liam says immediately, flexing in their leather jacket.

It knocks Harry back in time, Louis saying the exact same sentiment after hearing about another Nymph reservation sold to the royals, or keeping up with the resistances and revolutions in the colonies during the sixties. It had taken Harry decades to realise that the aristocracy her family stems from was the quintessence of abusive criminals, and some more to understand what role she herself is still playing in a society that is built upon genocide and discrimination. And Louis had played a huge part in that development, in recognising that she holds political impact. She had shaped her so strongly, so irrevocably.

And now Harry doesn’t have any ability to know whether she is okay.

“Yeah,” she agrees, fakes a cheer.

Liam narrows their eyes at her, then flicks her against the head. “Where’s your enthusiasm?”

Instead of flinching or hitting back, she grasps Liam’s hand, inspects the fading tattoo on their wrist. “You really re-trace that every morning, huh?”

More narrowing, more drawn brows. “It’s the only thing I have left from my sister I’m sure as hell making sure my body won’t forget it. Now, please let us shut up and dance. We’re standing here like it’s our first time in a club.”

Harry lets herself be shoved onto the dancefloor, avoiding the particularly nasty stains on the floor and searching for a pair of eyes catching her gaze. Someone in a crop top flips their hair and sends her a smirk. She smiles back.

 

 

-*-

 

 

Zayn has the grace back in her walk. She’s even wearing heeled shoes, hot pink nails matching her skirt and suit jacket, it has been a long time since she has worn anything but black. Her hair is falling in perfect ringlets around her face, high cheekbones glinting with highlighter.

Harry grins: “You look better.”

“Doesn’t she?” Niall giggles, throwing one arm around her girlfriend, button down riding up on her hip. “The energy is back. We went to bed quite late last night.”

Zayn rolls her eyes at the floor. “You had your fun when I was weaker than you.”

Her lashes are coated in mascara, slightly smudged in the corners probably not due to the lack of her skills. Clouds hang deep in the sky, trapping the heat beneath them and creating a sticky air that clings to the back of their necks, makes the fabric of their shirts dampen, liquidises all make-up. The fake grass on the roof has faded in colour in the last months, some blades of it snap as they’re making their way to their usual table. A group of their human colleagues gets up as soon as they sit down.

“You can stomach the synthesised blood then? Or have you found a type that fits?”

“Not yet. But the bottle has been a gift. Thank you. A lot.”

“That, and…” Niall rolls up her sleeve.

Harry stares at the marks on the inside of her arm, two punctures already healing. “Oh.”

“What, werewolf blood isn’t all that disgusting as you guys always make it out to be.”

“It really isn’t,” Zayn says, smirking in a way that exposes her teeth.

“No, no,” she hurries to say. “That’s not what – I just, Liam has been talking about drinking, uh, fresh blood, too, and… it’s not-. It has not been a part of my life for ages.”

“Haven’t you been going to that club?”

It keeps coming up, that place. Niall shouldn’t even know about it, and yet it’s a reminder of what Harry could have, wants to have, but will never allow herself again. Zayn steals a noodle from Niall’s plate, looks at it in contemplation. “Yeah, we’ve went there. But she didn’t go downstairs.”

They hum unanimously, scrutinising her. She clears her throat, takes a sip of water. “I’ve not really drank fresh blood since, uhm, since the nineties. Except for, like, tiny amounts so… I don’t plan on doing so again.”

“You’re not one of those people that lose control, are you? Fuck.”

“No, no,” she says again, crossing her arms. Then decides she has known them long enough, trusts them now. “I used to be, in the beginning. I’ve learned to control it. But I went to therapy for a few years, like. Exposure therapy ‘nd stuff. I just need to make sure that I’m not, uh, drunk or, or otherwise intoxicated. I’d just rather be safe.”

Intently, she follows the ups and downs of the buildings in the skyline, grey hues against grey hues, grey concrete, grey metal frameworks, grey shadows looming over the people rushing through the streets. It’s a comforting contrast to the red flashing up in her mind, the warm feeling of skin against her mouth.

“Can I…” Zayn taps a nail against the table cloth. “D’you wanna talk about what happened?”

Sometimes she prides herself on her recklessness, calls it love for life in her best and desire for true feelings in her worst moments, but she has had to learn that it can evoke something within her that she never wants to experience again. When they had left Paris she had had a few months of seeking willing strangers in places designed for human and vampire meet-ups, but that was after the second war and many people had tried to cope with the real world instead of fleeing into a bliss of irresponsibility compared to the years before. So she had no other choice but to stop. Then, after Vivien died, she tried to replace her loss with love and blood from other people. Louis was the one to remind her that she didn’t need that awful place of power imbalance and mindlessness to feel loved and cherished. But eventually, Harry had lost Louis, too. The moment she had to realise they hadn’t seen each other for two weeks, the moment she had to find a letter taped to the kitchen cabinet, was the moment she only fell into a deeper hole. 

Harry smiles. “Emotional impairment, that’s all. And carelessness. But neither will happen again.”

She had made sure to get help, speak to a professional, and understand the thought patterns that can lead to a part of her soul shutting off. Combined with the progress in medicine and the emergence of synthesised blood, she has only had a few relapses that only ever left her disappointed, and never got others into danger. She is no longer careless, no longer at the mercy of her senseless lust for blood and sex and intimacy.

Besides, Louis can’t leave her if she isn’t even by her side.  

 

 

-*-

 

 

It smells like cold mould and biting detergent, tiles still shiny but never really clean because decades of neglect have left stubborn stains. The walls in the staircase of Harry’s apartment block are painted in a tired grey, tapestry faded over the years and full of scratches but its subtle pattern still visible.  She has leaned against it countless of times, stumbling home during muggy evenings after spending her time off in the park or simply riding around in public transportation, or drunk in early morning hours when she knew she should be sleeping but her senses kept her awake all night. The slotting of the key into her letterbox, the click of it when she opens it just to find it empty, the muffled snap when she closes it again are all familiar sensations to her fingertips.

But it is noon and the clouds are sweeping across the sky, a breeze making the ride home pleasant and the short walk from the station bearable. And upon opening the box a white, inconspicuous letter has plunked to the floor. And the reason for Harry sinking against the cool walls is not drunkenness or exhaustion from work or a sneaking wariness of life, no. It’s the sending address. There is none. Just a name. In scrawny writing.

Harry’s bag falls to the scrubbed floor, undoubtedly soaking up the acid detergent. It’s really just a letter, no fancy wax seal, no elegant wrapping, an average size and an average stamp. And it’s light, too. She almost rips it in two, vision so blurry she has to blink in order to find the edges of the postcard inside of it. On it is an array of birds, heads covered in flowers of various sizes, like hats. _Love, Louis_ is what she zeroes in first. _Love, Louis_. A sob forms in her throat. She will be back, it says, Louis will be back. On the second of June. Waiting in front of the French café they used to work in during the late eighties, at midday, if it still stands, it says. If not, she will be waiting anyway, it says.

Harry knows for a fact that it still stands, has been eating there once a year every January for the last eight years. Just this winter she had spent a whole afternoon sitting at a table and searching for flickers of her memories of the time when they were sauntering among the tables or stirring up lemonade, always chatting, always complimenting the cook, always charming the customers, always stealing coffee for home. She wishes coffee would have any appeal for her now, can down it to feel the caffeine rush most of the time but would always find its taste too bitter to actually enjoy it. Louis loved it, though, especially in the forties when it was expensive and a luxury, and the both of them would savour every sip while contemplating to leave the city, sitting in chic restaurants that reminded them of a Paris they couldn’t go back to, mourning what humanity had done to their life.

She calls Niall. Niall has a cupboard full of coffee for the mornings after moon cycles she remains locked up in a cellar. Niall will have words of comfort, and a girlfriend with silent consolation.

 

 

-*-

 

 

Harry spends two nights on Niall’s and Zayn’s couch. Dissolving into tears and collapsing on top of the cushions was all she could do for half an hour, wordlessly trying to convince the couple that nothing bad had happened, nothing dangerous. Neither of them have ever met Louis - have heard about her, of course, because on some days Louis is all she can think about, talk about, recounting the wondrous moments they’ve had, always together, always an entity, getting lost in big cities or exploring towns that now have doubled in population, swiftly making friends and swiftly losing them again, courting beautiful ladies only to move on after a few months. 

“She was always dressed so smartly, you know, she would polish her shoes once a week, and, and when we started wearing trousers, god, she would always make sure they were ironed and had a perfect crease in the front,” she says, words slurring into each other. “She took such great care of me, she would always, always take care of me.”

Niall has one arm slung around her shoulder, she can feel her nod, can feel her fingers in her curls, stroking softly. All she does is hum, exchange glances with Zayn who is leaning against the new kitchen island and turning the postcard over to read its marvellous message.

Harry pulls her knees close to her chest: “I used to mock her because of the glasses she started wearing in '81, would tell her she looked like a spooky version of a countess we knew in Paris but she’d always only laugh and smile – she was so soft with me! Always!”

Always soft, always tender with her. During the wars, during the Great Slump, during the increasing hate crimes against non-humans, when they would march in the streets demanding their rights, first in the fifties alongside other vampires and shapeshifters, and then when the LGBT community started to strengthen, when people started to kiss in public, always scared, always with a glance in the other direction, but so, so proud. “She was the best thing in my life,” she whispers, frowning. It seems obvious, now, because it’s such a deep understanding within her, but it nudges her like a gentle wave arching into a haven.

“I’m glad you’ll have her back,” Zayn says, and leaves the postcard on the counter, sits beside her, lips curved into a calm smile.

“Yeah,” Harry murmurs, now staring at the threads of her jeans, the white dots in her nails, the fraying of the fabric once she scratches it.

“We’ll meet her, right?”

She swallows.

Niall jostles her. “You are glad to have her back, aren’t you, H?”

“Yes! Yes, of course!” And it is true, of course it is. Of course. It is what she has longed for the past eight years, once those letters stopped coming and she realised they hadn’t been enough in the first place. Every day she thinks of Louis, every day she fantasises about opening the door and finding her on the sofa, flower petals in her hair and grin in her lovely face. She imagined Louis looking around the flat, finding all the ways in which she expresses herself now, all the ways in which she stayed the same. “I don’t know what she’ll think of me. What if -…”

Zayn leans back into the couch, so casual and so elegant. But her skin is ashy, eyes rimmed with exhaustion. Harry sits up. “She last knew me as a stupid asshole. I didn’t –… give a fuck about anything. Not even her.”

She escapes Niall’s soothing arms, and paces up and down their living room, socked feet gliding over the polished floorboards. Her frantic gaze lands on a bouquet of flowers on the dinner table, white blossoms illuminated by the yellow light of the ceiling lamp. “She’ll expect to meet that version of me.”

Instead of hearing what the two have to say, she heads for the kitchen and rummages through the cupboards. Upon seeing her, Niall raises her brows so high they almost disappear into the flat mess of her fringe. “You sure you want to-“

“That’s for Zayn,” she says decidedly, and thrusts the bottle into Zayn’s face. “You need to drink, otherwise you’ll get weak again. Why won’t you fucking look after yourself.”

They stare at her. A gap between them where she had sobbed just two minutes ago, Niall’s arm still slung over the backrest, button-up coming undone. Her mouth begins to flatten into that familiar line, but before she can deny Harry’s help or snap at her, Zayn sighs and takes the bottle. “We’ve send them an E-mail, asking for a meeting. I’ll probably get my mixture by the end of the month. I do take care of myself.”

Niall’s tone is softer than anticipated. “And I do, too. You don’t have to worry about us, H.”

Harry clenches her jaw, focuses on receding her fangs, instead of on the tears that dare to well up in her. She nods once, but before she can watch them close the space on the couch, before Zayn’s side meets Niall’s reaching hand, she excuses herself and stalks to the balcony, arms wrapped around her own torso.

 

 

-*-

 

When she is home again, a parcel has been given to one of her neighbours. It is unbearably hard to refrain from laughing hysterically while she makes small talk with the old human, inviting her to tea, and accepting the bundle holding bottles of blood. Once they are stored safely, she sinks against the wall and lets her shoulders shake and tremble until her mind is nothing but white noise.

She spends days wandering around the city, imprinting the streets and crossroads and high buildings into her mind. They become part of the map of cities that have meant home to her, that have embodied excitement and new impressions. Not once does she enter a park, or the church near her flat. Its white façade is enough to calm her in those moments of worry, of nerves and anxiety. She doesn’t let herself think about the reaction she could have upon entering it.

 

 

-*-

 

 

Harry sees her immediately. It’s weird, right, because there’s still at least a hundred metres between them, barely any pedestrians, barely any rustling in the shops, not even a bird flying about, and she can’t look away. Won’t stop drinking in the familiar shape of her body, the swing of her hips she had always tried to suppress, the new strain in her lithe shoulders. Always one to avoid tight clothing, her loose shirt gently falls above the swell of her tits, nipples almost visible through the soft thread, seam tucked into black sweatpants. Her hair is shorter than it was in the eighties. It sweeps across her forehead now, glints of the sun catching in the individual strands and a few rose-coloured petals behind her ears. Her eyes cut away every few seconds, fluttering gaze never really meeting Harry’s, but a sweet smile caresses her pink lips.

Harry keeps looking at her, even when she has made halt, smile deepening.

Louis spreads her arms. “Give me a hug, then.”

It feels just like hugging her all those years ago. They still cog into each other seamlessly, the pressure of Louis’ chin against her clavicle familiar, their breasts brushing into each other softly, her heartbeat just as unique as it was when they first met. A sob claws its way up her throat, and she inhales rapidly, breathing in the scent of flowers, and rain, and, God, her blood. Her blood - it still smells familiar, too, it makes her mouth water, her fangs lengthen just a bit, makes her want to bury herself in Louis and never let go. “Louis,” she says. “Louis. I’ve missed you so, so much.”

Her _name_ , her name feels foreign on her tongue, the tender word pushing against her gum, clacking against her teeth. “Louis.”

“Jesus, Harry, I forgot how intense you can get.” Louis tries to pull away, strength equalling that of a vigorous Vampire, exceeding her own.

“I haven’t forgotten anything about you. I love you,” Harry says and tightens her grip.

A laugh vibrates through their bodies. “I’ve missed you too, you giant sap.”

It squeezes her chest, and she has the urge to ask _did you really? Did you? Did you spend the last twenty-seven years waiting to come back?_

She breathes her in instead, trying to push back all those memories that float to the surface of her consciousness, trying to stay in the here and now, in the way that her own shadows fall onto Louis’ skin, the way that Louis shivers against her when she rubs the dip of her spine. It’s new, this reaction, and so is seeing her in muted tones, without at least a bright lipstick or jewellery in floral shapes. Harry plucks one of the rose petals out of her hair, pulls back and smiles down. “You still have these all over yourself.”

They used to tumble into the pastries they had to bake, the dinners they had to serve, the drinks they made for themselves. “There’s been less of them since I moved here, you should’ve -,” Louis stops, then squeezes Harry’s forearm. “They practically covered my hair.”

“Yeah?” she asks, searching for more in her eyes, finding placid contentment. “You’ve been in nature a lot?”

Now, Louis laughs again, giggles, really. She buries her hands in her sweats, rolling up and down on the soles of her trainers. “Harry, I’ve been living with my sisters for the past eight years.”

“What, like… in the woods?”

“ _In the woods_ ,” she repeats mockingly, “at home, yeah. There’s still some hectares of land that belong to us, who would’ve thought.”

Harry stares at her. “You’ve been… you were in your other body all this time?”

The joyful expression on Louis’ face fades, trailed by a fall of her lashes. She looks so much smaller all of a sudden, as if the street behind her grew in size, the lamppost by the pavement stretched a few inches, and the roaring cars decided to stifle her voice. “Most of it. We haven’t… we’ve had some difficulties, a few years back.”

“Difficulties?” Harry echoes, and doesn’t know if she can dare to hug Louis again, pull her into her, press a kiss to her forehead.

“Some company trying to trick us into something, you know how it is.” People throw glances at them while they’re crossing the road, casual scans like people in cities tend to throw around, but they make Harry want to shield Louis from them, pull her into a quiet corner.

She extends her hand and fiddles with the sleeve of Louis' shirt, contemplating her next words, remembering what she had told her about her sisters, about living in an entirely different body for years, quiet, peaceful, growing towards the sun. Louis doesn’t flinch. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. But I’m also happy that you got to spend so much time with your sisters, uhm, are they okay? Are you okay?”

“I am,” Louis says, smile returning. “I am. I love you, you mushy idiot. Let’s go inside, yeah? And talk? They still serve that delicious cake, don’t they?”

Harry nods, and lets her turn, watches the movement of her muscles beneath her clothes, the sliver of skin that is visible between the seam of her pants and her socks, thin hairs patchy above her ankle. Her butt bounces as she hops over the step in front of the restaurant, seam of her shirt dipping below her neck, and Harry swallows down a surge of longing, of affection, of concern.

Louis is safe, has been safe these past years. And now she’s here, centimetres away from her, emitting warmth.

Not one guest inside the restaurant reacts upon their entrance, all keep staring at their screens or conversing with their friends, bursts of laughter and the tinkling of glasses swinging through the sparely decorated room. The walls are painted a light lilac, contrasting with the dark wood of low panels and curling table legs, sun waiting behind lace curtains, room instead illuminated by bright lamps attached in rows on the ceiling. She can’t see Louis’ face, but notices her change in body language, her slow walk in following a polite waiter. They’re led to a space by the window, a view of a small patio enclosed by tall houses. Some of the leaves of a wide hazel bush have turned yellow.

“They’ve changed the interior quite a bit,” she remarks upon Louis’ silence.

Louis leans back in her chair, toying with the edge of the menu. “It’s basically a new restaurant.”

“D’you wanna go somewhere else?”

“No. No, let’s stay here. You’ll have to live with me not giving you my full attention, though.”

Harry chimes in to her cheerful mirth, soaking up the brightness in her grin, the wafts of her scent, the beat of her heart. “How could I ever live without it?”

“How _did_ you do it the last years?” 

Her knee knocks against the tabletop. “Uh, good. Okay, I guess.”

One of Louis’ brows arches up. “Really?”

She stutters, grasping for a coherent sentence. “I – I, yeah, I’ve been okay. Not so – I mean, I moved, uh, moved around a lot - in the beginning, only. As you know, since we wrote letters. Uhm. I’ve found a few friends here. Vampires, too. They’re very young, one of them, uhm, Zayn, has only been turned in a few years ago, but, but they’re very sweet, the both of them. And Zayn has a girlfriend, she’s a werewolf. That’s also very, uhm, nice. We work together.”

Louis’ heart had spiked somewhere in the middle of that ramble and is now audibly slowing down, it’s such a forceful and yet familiar sound that it silences Harry for a few seconds. Her eyes set on the area on her neck that gently pulsates from the flow of her blood, tanned skin speckled with a few red spots. She breathes through her mouth.

“I’m glad,” Louis says, in the same tone Harry had used to talk about her sisters. “I was worried you’d end up holing yourself in somewhere. I didn’t want to come home to finding you in another dump, in some motel, stolen blood bags all around you.”

Harry’s forced chuckle doesn’t even make it out of her throat, whole torso tightening up in a mixture of shame about that day, of tenderness upon Louis’ concern, but mostly about Louis’ choice of words. “You consider this home?” she breathes out.

Now it’s Louis’ turn to open her lips several time, only small sounds coming out. “I just meant – I meant, coming back. And seeing you.”

A pain in her jaw makes her aware of the force with which she clenches her teeth.

Louis shifts: “I’ve… we’ve known each other so long, Harry, of course you are… you are like. Ah, you are so dear to me.”

It’s nothing compared to the confessions they've given each other in the past, nothing compared to the thought-out speeches, spontaneous declarations in candle-lit nights, small poems in the beginning. They have always been affectionate friends. It has been so, so long, though, since she has even heard Louis’ voice, got to sit and let its rough sweetness wash over her.

Harry starts crying.

The waiter that had steered towards them abruptly changes their direction and busies themselves with some dishes, the clinking of them barely perceptible through her own sobs. She buries her face in her hands, presses her palms to her mouth to will it to silence, feeling hot tears slide down her cheeks.

Louis lets out a quiet gasp and then her body is suddenly wrapped around hers, Harry’s back covered in her warmth, curls being drawn out of her eyes. Warm breath tickles her neck. “Love,” she hears, a quiet murmur. “Darling, you’re okay, you’re safe, you’re so, so dear to me. Didn’t you know? Always.”

An even stronger pressure forces more tears to come, her shoulders to shake. She’s sniffing loudly and unabashedly and it is gross, but Louis has witnessed her in worse states, has found her out of her mind in the bed of a cheap motel, soaked in stolen blood and alcohol; has seen her so scared she couldn’t move in those bunkers during the early forties; has seen her get angry in a way that exposed the lethal features of her physique.

The chair scrapes against the floor as Louis turns it around to lead Harry’s head against her chest, carding through the hairs in the back of her neck. “I’m sorry it took me so long to come back.”

She curls her fingers into her top and tries to balance her breathing, but with her nose pressed into Louis’ sternum the shaking in her body won’t stop. “Missed you so much.”

“I missed you, too.”

It has to be enough for now. Even though everything in her yearns for an apology for every single year she spend without knowing whether Louis was okay, even though hearing those low murmurs of affection Louis is giving her only soothes the surface of the churning stream within her, she has to pull herself together and be strong. Swallowing the salt of her tears, she straightens her back, wiping the wetness from her face. Spots of grey stain the white of Louis’ shirt.

“You needed your space,” she says scratchily. “I’m glad you found it with your sisters.”

Judging by the faint glint in Louis’ eyes, she isn’t convinced by Harry’s demeanour but she slings her arms around her neck in a fleeting hug and steps back to her seat, rubbing her thighs. “You needed space, too. And from what you told me, you found it. Now, where’s that waiter? And then you’ll tell me about that Neal and that Zayn, yeah?”

The waiter, visibly uncomfortable by Harry’s outbreak approaches them with a masked smile. They must be used to non-humans frequenting the restaurant because they don’t seem surprised by their avoidance of proper food, Louis going for plain water and a chocolate cake, Harry asking for flavoured synthesised blood. It’s extremely overpriced in restaurants but better than nothing at all.

“You don’t go for Bplus anymore?” Louis asks casually.

The image of hundreds of hazy evenings vanishes in Harry’s mind as soon as it popped up. “No, I’ve decided that I can afford the fake stuff. It… it felt like stealing from people who truly need it.”

“You need it.”

“I can live off of cherry flavoured replacements,” she shrugs, a try at light-heartedness.

“But it’s not the same thing is it? Does it even taste good?”

Harry purses her lips to avoid grinning. Louis’ incredulous look makes the pain in her ribcage all the more bearable. “Not as good as you.” It’s always been a joke between them, a stretched one at that since she doesn’t even recall the exact taste of her blood.

And, oh, Louis blushes, that is new. A rosy colour climbs high into her cheeks. “Shut up.”

“You can’t silence the truth, Sweetheart.” It’s mostly gone now, the pain, chased away by the little sweep of Louis’ tongue along her own lips, her bashful fidgeting. And by the memory of a chilly afternoon, a silly talk, a foolish but well ending experiment to see whether the blood of nymphs tastes as good as the blood of humans.

“You can’t possibly remember the taste of it. Don’t – shush! Stop talking about that, it’s so weird. Tell me about your friends.”

She does. She begins to tell the story of meeting Zayn, hitting on her in a bar in a seedier part of the city, how she still can’t read her most of the time but how her girlfriend Niall is a ruthless enthusiast, swinging between open affection and bitter moodiness. Louis shakes her head in exasperation as she complains about their struggles to find a blood type for Zayn, puckers her mouth when Harry grumbles about feeling babied by the two of them, and proposes a toast at Harry’s happiness in her job. Well, that last bit she exaggerates a bit, romanticizing the view from the rooftop instead of whining about the lack of shade from the sun.

Louis doesn’t talk much and Harry interprets it as an apology or a nudge to regain confidence, but it still leaves her wondering. Watching her lick the last remains of chocolate from her fork, she asks: “What’d you do the years before going back to your sisters? You wrote me from all over Europe.”

“Travelled a bit,” comes the obvious answer. “Mostly to small towns around the south of France. Italy a bit. Spain. You know, those places.”

“D’you go to Paris?”

She swallows. “No. But to Florence.”

“Alone?”

“No.”

“With whom?”

Louis glances up. “Some people I met on the way.”

Harry can’t stop asking. “Many?”

“A few. Mostly humans. A pack of werewolves, once. Even a nymph.”

“Vampires?”

“No,” but her heart stumbles over a beat.

“I haven’t met a single nymph here,” Harry decides to say, leaning back in her chair.

“No fucking wonder. I feel sick just breathing in the air. I’ve found a place in the midst of a huge park and the soil is still filled with shit.”

“They got nice parks her”, she says in defence, taking a sip of her nearly empty glass. She wouldn’t really know, but Louis talking so indignantly about the city they used to call home makes the constriction around her chest flare up again.

“And companies pumping their chemicals into the rivers.”

They used to go to protests together, chaining themselves to railways, re-using signs that had been soaked in rain, arguing with cops in Louis’ and arguing with other non-humans in Harry’s case. Some of their actions probably had positive impacts, mostly though, all she got from that was disappointment upon seeing too little change. Louis always used to be the one emphasising their communities’ accomplishments, whether it’d be the non-human organisations starting on in the fifties, or the courage shown by black women and other People of Colour in the LGBT community in the eighties.

Harry cocks her head to one side. “Are you going to find a place outside the city?”

“Nah,” Louis says slowly. “I don’t think so. Not yet.”

“When will you let me visit, then? And when will you come to my flat?”

They share a smile, the corner of Louis’ mouth darkened by chocolate, Harry’s own lips tingling. In the century they’ve known each other they had shared flats, single rooms in cheap as well as lavish hotels, an abandoned villa. They had rented spaces owned by families, old human women, and greedy gentrifiers, they had made a home out of nearly every building they deemed their own. 

Louis bats her eyelashes. “Soon, darlingst Sunshine.”

 

 

-*-

 

 

  The next day, she doesn’t get out of bed. Her body and mind are exhausted, having spent the whole evening and then some talking to Louis again, getting to see her, scent her. Touch her some more, after taking a walk down the streets, knuckles bumping into each other, stolen caresses of craving fingers. It had felt like any other rekindling in their lives, like they hadn’t even been apart: Still falling into conversation easily, Louis still gently fixing her hair, Louis still getting soft whenever Harry makes a joke. And at the same time, she had to witness new and strange behaviours in Louis: Her writing is sloppier, her smile sharper, her wording careful and precise. She holds herself differently now, something hard in her shoulder blades, something that has been sharpened by pain. That struggle to keep control over their land must have drained all of the nymphs, must have felt like another battle in a recurring fight.

But Harry knows Louis has kept something else to herself, either something more concerning that conflict, or something else entirely. She hadn’t slept, writhing in her sheets at night and staring out of her windows through the gaps in her curtains, thinking about Louis out there somewhere. Relief should have made her tired, should have soothed the worry she had been carrying for eight years now. But a restlessness has strung itself around her shoulders, making her open book after book just to discard it after a few minutes, not even videos of people making origami on YouTube can make her loosen up. Not even getting off – several times - helps. It just makes her sweaty, duvet clinging to her back, clenching around nothing, and desperately wishing for a warm body next to her.

 

 

-*-

 

 

She doesn’t wait for Niall and Zayn to ask, they’ve barely sat down before she starts recounting yesterday’s events, probably dwelling on details. They seem overly excited, or Harry simply sees her own happiness mirrored back at her. The sun burns down onto them, letting heat rise from the grass covering the rooftop, and she has to make some unpleasant calls, but her mood is undeterred, dimples edged into her cheeks. Every hour, she pulls up the notes app in her phone to look at the address Louis had typed in with clumsy fingers. Today. Today she’ll see her again, and their time together won’t be disrupted by falling tears, they will have a conversation that’ll bridge the decades they spend apart, they will open their hearts to each other, revealing what they have been experiencing, and feeling, and longing for the past years.

Harry leaves work early, right after lunch, after having hugged Niall and Zayn close to her effervescent chest. At home, she puts dough into the oven while taking a shower, making sure to smell nice and clean, no traces of fake aromas or sharp chemicals. She braids some strands in her hair, puts on a flowing skirt. Some crumbs wedge themselves into the fabric whilst she puts the cookies into a Tupperware container, but that’s alright, maybe it’ll add to the charm. On the way to the station, she hops into a supermarket, taking too long to decide on fruit but choosing her favourites in the end, picks up a bouquet spontaneously. 

 

The directions Louis wrote down guide her to a spot of green in an outer ring of the city, small houses strung together along unattended avenues. Trash bags lie in front gardens, only few of them are well tended but the ones that do seem inviting and homey. An old man sits by a crumbling fence, bopping his head to Persian music. The gate to the park, hidden behind a shed, creaks in its hinges, path of cobbles winding down a playground and through an array of thin trees. The further she gets, the lesser become the patches in the grass, the louder grows the chirping of cicadas, the more saplings grow from the earth. She looks up and the sight of the sky is narrowed by dozens of butterflies, bees, even dragon-flies hurrying about. Behind the treetops, something is haloed by the sun, the beams of it broken by crenellations.

It’s a turret. 

Most of it is covered in ivy, barren façade only visible around the arched windows and the Iron Gate towering in front of the door. As she approaches, nails jabbing into her palms, she hears bold singing, the sound of light footsteps prancing across muffled stone. Louis doesn’t make an effort to sound sweet or angelic, belting out lyrics and probably flapping around her arms in the way she always used to. Harry joyfully catches the hasty dying of a truly marvellous high note in reaction to her pulling on the string of a rusty bell.

The footsteps rumble closer, there’s the sound of a lock sliding back, then there’s Louis’ breathing, then there’s Louis’ face. She’s flushed, eyes bright and hair stuck to her temples, yellow and orange petals sticking to her neckline, tumbling from behind her ears. “Good Day,” she says, grinning. “How may I help you?”

Harry hides the flustered scrunching of her fists in the folds of her skirt, bowing slightly. “I’m looking for a mythical creature, I think she’s supposed to live around her. I don’t suppose you know where I can find her?”

“Must be the wrong address,” Louis says, leaning against the frame of the door. All she is wearing is a pair of dirty pants and an oversized shirt, bright peach making her skin glow.

“I bring sweets and fruit?” she shrugs her right shoulder, bopping up the bag slung over it. Louis barely glances at it, lips twitching, smirk growing. “And, uhm. Flowers.”

She bites her lips and presents the daffodils, the freesias, the geranium, the honeysuckle. Louis’ heart stumbles, before that smirk disappears. “You chose them?”

“Yeah. C’mon, let me in. I wanna hug you.”

The gate swings outwards, nearly scratching up her suede boots, and deepening an imprint in the soil. Harry steps aside and encompasses Louis into her embrace, clutching her lithe body, nose buried in her hair. Flowers. Since the beginning she has smelled of flowers. She swallows, then snaps her eyes open as her bag hits the both of them in the hip, the bouquet crushing between them. Behind Louis a garden unfurls inside the tower.

So many colours, even more fragrances fill up the round room, in all hues and levels of intensity. Immediately a grouping of trees demands all attention, one of them standing out with its white trunk, twigs curling up into the air and brandishing pink blossoms. The others are growing in its shadow, most leaves still coiled in tight buds. The majority of plants are sprouting up the walls, vines climbing up little bumps in the stone and budding out of the ceiling, but some of them form patches across the carpet, rooting directly from cracks in the floor. So many shades, and patterns, and textures. _Life_ is surrounding her.

Tears well up in her eyes.

“Have you developed allergies?” Louis asks once Harry has let out the gasp welling up her throat, and sinks her nails into her bicep.

“Shut up,” she says, “let me take this in.”

“Alright, but don’t take too long, I want those cookies.”

Still grasping Louis’ arm, she lets a single tear slide down her nose. “I’ve missed you so, so much. And I love your mind, I love your vision. I love you.”

“Stop being dramatic.” But Harry can hear the speeding of her heart, the pleased tone, feels her sneak a hand down Harry’s back. “You haven’t even tasted the honey, your tongue’ll fall out.”

“You’ve already made friends with bees?” she exclaims excitedly, finally setting the bag aside and clutching her chest.

Louis laughs, leading her inside. “A swarm of them came with me, actually. They’ve chosen a spot behind the tower.”

Harry falls down to her knees and while she’s at it, kisses a tiny sprout growing by the door, then sinks her fingers into the fluffy carpet that is hidden beneath the plants. “How’d you do all this?”

“Few of my sisters helped me move in.”

Her head snaps up. “And you didn’t introduce us?”

A small huff falls between Louis’ curved lips. “They’ve never spoken a human language in their life. And they wanted to be home as soon as possible, I wouldn’t want to keep them in the city. One day, one day you can meet them.”

“I really want to.”

“For now, let _us two_ meet, yeah? Again,” she adds, meeting Harry’s stare.

Silenced, she lets herself be steered into the shadow of the white tree, sits down leaning against it, watching Louis put the bouquet in a vase, flowers blurring into the ivy, only a slim staircase disrupting the greenery, a narrow stove hiding next to it.

“Do you have electricity in here?”

“Yeah, some rich dude used it as a writing retreat or summat, he installed the lamps, too.”

Lanterns are attached around the tower walls, their floral decorations blending into the surroundings. “Does he know? About all this?”

“Of course. He owns a bunch of these all over the city and rents them to us, some wanna-be leftist trying to use his privilege, I guess. I’m lucky we have those savings.”

She sinks down next to her, one leg covered in spots of light and the other shaded by the roof of pink blossoms above them. A cluster of daisies by her feet turn their heads towards her, some of them grow a practically indiscernible amount. At first, the white tree had seemed like the centre of the garden, but with every single one of Louis’ moves a bud blushes open, a leaf expands, or a vine reaches towards her.

Harry trails the tip of her finger along Louis’ shin, against the stubbly hairs glinting in the sunlight. “Do you feel disconnected from me?”

One of the daisies twitches in a breeze coming through the windows. “I – I mean,” Louis falters, own fingers tracing down her own thigh and meeting Harry’s at her knee. “We haven’t known each other in almost thirty years.”

“Eight. And just because we haven’t seen each other, doesn’t mean we’ve… outgrown each other, we - we wrote letters!”

“Harry…”

“You still know how to make my tea, don’t you! Isn’t that proof?”

“Are you telling me you haven’t changed your preference for tea in all those years?” Louis snips, only a hint of amusement in her eyes.

“I haven’t,” she argues, furrowing her brows.

“Well,” her hand is pushed away, Louis stands up. “I have. Hope you’re okay with my choice.”

Despite her tense body language, she doesn’t look out of place in the room, round walls looming behind her like ominous accomplices. Some white roses seem like they have sharpened their thorns. Louis reaches behind a vine, pulls out two cups and fills them up, balancing them while stepping over a creeping plant with opulent leaves. Again, she sinks down next to Harry, legs crossed.

She accepts the cup and traces the swirling of herbs in them, blows across the shimmering surface. They used to sip from delicate china in the first months they became attached, not from wonky cups with paint chipping off of the rim. 

Louis groans. “Look, H. There’s nothing bad about growing apart. We had to, otherwise we -… we would’ve both end up hurt. Aren’t you excited about getting to know the new me?”

Above, beneath the roof of the tower, the trailing plants make it look like a curtain of green and pink cotton swings in the wind, weightless fluffs and pollen floating around and reflecting light.  “You think you’re a new you?”

“I’ve certainly changed, yeah.”

Harry breathes in the hot steam, dips in a finger and tastes it. It’s definitely not black, not how Louis would’ve taken it in the eighties. Not how Harry would have made it for her when they had lived together. “I don’t think I’ve changed at all. Is it because of the thing with that company? Will you tell me more?”

“I do think you have changed,” Louis says quietly. The tips of her fingers are getting red as she presses them onto the cup. “You seem grounded again. Not as lost and aimless.” She smiles. “You’re spending time outside of clubs.”

The tea tastes great. It has rich flavour and a sweet trace and Harry nearly starts crying again. “I mean, even I was self-aware enough to realise that I was using some shitty coping mechanisms back then. I’m better now.”

Louis tilts her head, eyes big and curve in her lips small. “That makes me so happy, Babe, you have no idea.”

“Thank you.” She clears her throat. “But I really… I really do want to know what happened to you. I, I mean – I know you told me stuff, but. What…”

Desperate, she tries to keep their gazes locked, won’t allow either of them to look away. This is important to her. She can’t bear knowing something so drastic had happened without knowing what it is, without knowing what scars it left. Louis’ neck is still bowed, smile small and shadowed. Then she laughs, short and rough, rolls her eyes and lets out a sigh, flicking a flower petal from her forehead. “I’m sorry I’m so secretive. It’s just weird to, like, have to talk about it instead of others just _knowing_. After everything settled down again, after that thing with the company, we all just kind of… drew back into ourselves. We barely transformed, you should’ve seen the house before I started to live in this body again. Natalie would’ve had a fit.” Harry’s chest aches at the mention of the salon hostess who had welcomed them with such open arms. “Anyway, ah. That wasn’t… the only thing that left me kind of… shaken.”

This is it. This is what will explain her absence, why it took Louis so long to come back to Harry. Her own breathing slows. She sets aside the dented cup, and places a hand back on Louis’ shin, playing with some of the soft hairs. “Tell me.”

Their fingers meet again. “I was convinced I was in love.” Harry’s body freezes. “There was this person I met in France, and it was probably because they reminded me of the time we had in Paris, probably because they reminded me of Dolly and Djuna, but – yeah. We were committed for a few years, travelled together, you know. But.” The frozen muscles in Harry’s neck turn into iron, crushing her throat. “Eventually we had to realise that we didn’t… well, I needed something stable, something constant, someone who I could always come back to, and they needed the excitement, I guess, the thrill of travelling, of being – rootless.”

Louis giggles, and Harry is surprised to see that it’s genuine mirth, the familiar grin that crinkles up the corners by her eyes, and makes the light sparkle in them, the one that makes the apples of her cheek glow. “She didn’t even like tulips, can you believe? Thought them to be overrated and boring. I should’ve known from the start not to latch onto her like a – like a vine.” Some anemones behind the smallest one of the trees, the one with a smooth bark, open their blossoms. Harry knows they shouldn’t even be blooming around this time of year, knows even better that Louis’ touch would probably encourage them to show their colours in every type of climate.

“So you two broke up?” She must have been truly unsatisfied, must have been miserable, because Harry had always known her as someone to give many chances, someone so patient and kind in a relationship that it often left her too selfless for her own good.

“We did, yeah,” Louis says. “It was exactly what I needed. As, like, an eye-opener.”

“What d’you mean?” The vice around her neck tightens, she doesn’t like where this is going. Not at all.

“I’m not made for a relationship, it just doesn’t work. Who would’ve thought that all those movies depicting us as incapable of love were right.”

They laugh. Then Harry sees a flicker in Louis’ expression. And tea soaks into the carpet, as she knocks over the cup in her haste to get her hands on Louis’ face, to make her look at her. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You have sticky-,” but Harry won’t let her pry her fingers off her cheeks, strokes her thumbs from the corners of her mouth to the bags of her eyes. The thumping of her heart grows louder.

“I thought you would never fall into that trap – what happened to the -… Louis, you can’t be serious.”

It feels so absurd to think that the person that would compose sonnets in her free time would internalise this; the person that was always the first one to strike up a song about love and affection, someone with so much love to give, someone so loveable. Someone so dear to Harry.

“Please, can you calm down.“

“But-“ Something pricks her in the calf. A thistle has spread out beneath her bent legs, starting to dig its thorns into her skin.

Louis raises a brow. When she speaks, the muscles in her face move against Harry’s palm. “I didn’t lose my critical thinking when my heart got broken, thanks a lot. Not like it was the first time.”

“I – I know, I didn’t think…” She quiets. The thistle has stopped growing, but has now covered the tea in the carpet. She looks around and sees various plants either further away than they’ve been moments ago, or angling sharp leaves at her, a bunch of Easter roses have turned their heads at her like little soldiers.

“I’m not serious, I’m really not, obviously,” Louis turns her head and goes to bite at Harry’s left thumb, smiling, smiling, smiling. “I was just sad. But I had eight years to get over that, stop being so fussy.”

Slowly, Harry draws back, her body finally relaxing. Embarrassment overcomes her, but she tries not to let it show, huffs out a chuckle instead. “Sorry. It sounds kinda, uhm, messy, that’s all. Gosh, this is so intense. I missed you. I love you.”

“You’ve said that,” Louis reaches for her cup, winks at her. “Tell me something I don’t already know. Tell me about your day. Tell me what you’re currently reading. Oh, and take some more tea, you slob.”

Alleviated she does as told, gets up and refills her tea, is honest about liking it, is honest about the excitement she felt for today, repeatedly saying how much she has missed Louis. She won’t be getting tired of doing so. And judging by the smile that she receives every time and the light fluttering of nearby flowers, Louis won’t be getting tired of hearing it either. Even if she’s unbelievably smug about Harry almost draining her stash of the tea, constantly teases her about small things like the stares she can’t control, or the constant urge to touch Louis’ warm body, the need to inhale deeply once in a while.

The sun sets when she’s on the way back, orange light reflecting on the unknown number in her call history, the number of Louis’ clunky, ancient phone. They decided to meet up again as soon as possible, Louis insisted on getting to know the city better, on Harry showing her the parks and pretty buildings and lonely bookshops. It feels like Louis is coming home.

 

 

 

-*-

 

 

Three days later Louis still hasn’t written.

  
Harry is getting so anxious she contemplates seeking out the club she hasn’t visited in months, getting all the more agitated with the knowledge of what distractions it could offer her. She drinks too much blood, blending it with fruit in the beginning and sitting at her kitchen table sipping it through a paper straw at the end of the night. The moon judges her through the open window.

“Tell me to calm the fuck down,” she demands of Niall, as soon as her phone call gets answered.

“Calm the fuck down, what’s your problem?”

She sighs. “I can’t sleep.”

“Hm. Maybe it’s because you’re a nocturnal vampire, ever thought about that?”

“I’ve adjusted to the human cycle ages ago, it’s not that.” In the darkness the slight strain that stings behind her eyes during the day eases a bit. The white of her plain walls glows in a silver sheen, shiny surfaces of the refrigerator and stove reflecting the city illuminations. Every now and then the headlights of a car reach up to the room. “I feel out of place.”

“In your life?”

Harry frowns. “I dunno. No. In this timeline.”

“I’ve felt like that almost everywhere.”

“Really?” she whispers, quietly exhaling.

“I thought it was being a werewolf, in the beginning. Ya know? To no one’s surprise it kinda alienated my family from the others. They would exclude us from town meetings, never had many friends in school, all that. Still felt like that when I moved here, but I figured it was because I moved to a new, strange city. Imagine that. Ah, then I thought it was the dyke thing. Butch daring to have a happy life, and on top of that she turns into a fucking beast once a month.”

“But it isn’t just that?”, and she knows her heartbreak is audible in her voice.

“The world is out to fucking fuck us up, H. It’s a trauma, living through it when you’re like us.”

“What, so,” she huffs, “you think I don’t know that? I’ve lived longer through that than you.”

“Oh, right. So what’d you want to hear from me, grandma?”

She fights the lump in her throat with a sip of blood, holding it in her mouth, sloshing it against her fangs. “What’d you do to feel less out of place?”

“Make space for myself.”

Another huff: “Welcome to Niall’s ten step plan for a beautiful life: Step one, make space for yourself. Step two, make space for yourself. Step three, make space-“

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about. When was the last time you felt at home?”

Maybe she should finally set foot in that church by the park. Before her love for women had been exposed in the house of her parents, they used to dress up like everyone else and show off their finest jewellery during mass. Going to church meant feeling admired and loved. It hadn’t been quite as fulfilling as discovering her place among poets, artists and writers during the 20's but its memory still evokes a mending sensation in her chest. But that also meant that Churches changed meaning after those poets, artists and writers aged.

“I’ve missed-…,” she starts again. Concentrates on the smiley faces printed on the label of the bottle. “Louis is back, and it feels more painful than when she was gone. It’s like I’m remembering pain that wasn’t there before.”

“You probably suppressed it.”

“I know I suppressed it, it still fucking hurts. Especially, especially because – well, because, theoretically, I could see her any time now, you see? I could. But she said she wanted a bit of time, still hasn’t texted me.” To check whether this is still true she pulls the phone back for a second. “She doesn’t want to see me, Niall.”

“Three days is nothing, you dumbass. Zayn didn’t text me back for a week when I asked her out, all because she thought I was human. Can you fucking believe? Louis is probably making some minor detail into something big, just like you’re doing it. I thought you’ve known each other for a hundred years.”

Not quite, but the number still leaves her staring at her own fingers. “We have…”

“Did you two ever hook up?”

“What?”, she asks surprised. “Why’re you asking? No, we haven’t.”

“Never? Not even kissed? You’re talking about her like an ex-lover.”

Memories of lying next to Louis on various beds, sharing blankets and pillows, body heat and the same breath, flood her limbs, like they’re remembering what they’re supposed to be doing. “I mean, uhm, I was attracted to her, sometimes. And when we met we used to flirt a lot but we still do that now because, because, we, uhm, we fell into friendship before we could ever fall in love. You know?”

“You do know that you don’t need to be in love to have sex, right? Maybe it’d be good for you, realise that Louis is just another person and not the fucking moon in the sky.”

It puts a smile to her face that had been drowning in sorrowful expressions. “I dunno if moon metaphors work that well for me.”

“Creatures of the night unite, yeehaw.”

“Yeehaw,” she echoes, and they dissolve into delirious laughter.

The bottle is empty by the end of their call.

 

 

-*-

 

 

She sees the text when she’s sneaking a look at her phone despite having procrastinated all day at work. Lunch had been the only time she felt more than muted reactions, fussing about the bags under Zayn’s eyes, being shamed by Niall who’s still mocking her about her dramatic cry for help via the phone. The same phone emits an innocent green light and the words: _you free this weekend?_

 

 

-*-

 

 

They explore the city. Well, Harry leads them through the maze of streets she had memorised and Louis either marvels in approval or wrinkles her nose in distaste. She’s delighted by the park near Harry’s flat, as was expected. So was the exasperation with which she crosses the streets, uncaring whether annoyed drivers honk at her slow pace or people on bikes nearly knock her down, everyone shouting at her when she flips them off. Harry repeatedly has to grasp her arm and pull her aside. But that was a thing when they met in Paris, it was a thing when they lived here in the eighties, and it will be a thing whenever Louis has to live somewhere with more bricks than trees. Heading home from the park leads them by the white church, sun directly above the tower and washing the colour of the sky into the reflecting roof. Neither of them react to it.

Now, Louis is tucked into the corner of Harry’s couch and the sight is truly healing, truly gripping. She’s in nothing but a white dress, straps of it falling down her shoulder whenever she moves. Its flimsy texture catches against the zip of one of the velvet cushions, and now she’s fiddling with it, thighs spread. “Why’m I even wearing clothes? Who fucking cares?”

“Hear, hear,” Harry says, plopping down next to her and directing her gaze onto the records stacked in the shelf next to the television - away from warm skin. “Apart from children, of course.”

A puff of air. “Yeah, I know. The concept of humans actually bearing children, creating them inside their bodies is still so fucking weird to me. Amazing, yeah… but. Imagine crawling out of a womb.”

“I’ve crawled out of a womb, remember? Uh, slid, I guess. Sashayed.”

Louis laughs, frail petals falling from her hair into her lap. “I can’t even imagine having to grow up in this world in this _body_. Seems so rushed.”

“It was rushed. So fucking rushed. Nowadays children at least get to be children.”

“Oh, yeah, you told me… Those hateful dinners. Fuck your parents, honestly.” Louis recalls what Harry has shared with her, even now. It soothes every aching cell in her body. “I’m so glad stuffy dinners aren’t a thing in my culture.”

“Isn’t every night spend in your other body a family dinner, though? I mean you’re all connected, right? And drawing minerals from the earth non-stop. Let me try.” She slaps away Louis' fumbling fingers, hunching over her lap to get the dress out of the zipper. The moment she sniffs in preparation for the task, a waft of floral aroma hits her in the nose. It’s undeniably Louis, but it’s so near, so strong she has to press her tongue against her gum. It’s been hot all day and the sun is only beginning to set, Louis must have been sweating slightly, or. Or Harry is getting more perceptible to her scent.

Breathing in in short bursts, she quickly untangles fabric and zipper, tosses the cushion away, patting Louis’ thigh once it hits the floor. Only then she becomes aware of the loud thudding in the room. Her gaze sweeps the floorboards for a split second, before landing on Louis’ chest. Clings to the curve of her breasts, then wanders upwards along the line of her throat, clings there, too. Falls to her parted lips.

“Sorry,” she whispers but she doesn’t know for what exactly.

“’s okay,” Louis replies, strained. Pink blooms on her cheeks.

Harry nods curtly, sliding away a bit. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“I know.”

They fall silent.

The noise of traffic is buzzing in from outside, a shrilling alarm, dogs barking from downstairs, followed by exasperated screeching from their owners. The beating of Louis’ heart is still pounding in her ears. Had this been as unbearable before? How could she have forgotten the quivers that overcome her upon scenting this mixture of warmth, flora and sweet breaths? Her fingers stick together, calves glued to the couch, panties tightening with every constriction in her pelvis. If she’d glance at Louis now, she’d be sure of it, she would not be able to hold back from kissing her. And in this instant, with the first beams of an orange sun sweeping across the walls and the air damp with heat, she believes that Louis wouldn’t pull back.

It could be their first kiss. Eight years of silence, almost three decades of not seeing each other, only letters as carriers of affection between them, and they’d kiss in the living room of her own flat.

Harry clears her throat and offers to get some water, up and away before Louis has even finished nodding. In the kitchen, she first stares at the fridge in shock, then a giddy happiness assaults her and renders her useless for the rest of the day. Louis is back. Louis is healthy. Harry maybe, possibly wants to kiss her into oblivion. She doesn’t know what’s that supposed to mean for their rekindling friendship, doesn’t know if it has to mean anything, but what she does know is that the mere thought of it turns all the overwhelming emotions of the last three decades upside down. 

Therefore, what she says once she’s back on the couch, hands folded in her lap is: “I love you.”

Louis, who has been scrutinising the two glasses of water on the coffee table very intently, wiggles her upper body, cheeks still blotchy pink. “I love you, too.”

“I’m glad you’re here.” 

More wiggling. “I – thanks. Me, too. You have a nice home, by the way.”

“What, no complaints about the interior? D’you like typography all of a sudden?”

She grins when Louis snorts, visibly relaxes and flicks a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Those motivational quotes are quite horrible, you’re still so fucking cheesy.”

Pleased, Harry nods at the posters lined up between the window and the entrance to the bedroom: “You have to admit, they’re all important truths.”

“Oh God,” Louis whines, hides her face in the cushion that brought them into this situation. “They’re so embarrassing, you could have some stunning art on your walls, but _no_ , you chose stuff that looks like advertisement.”

It easily leads them to banter about nasty ads, how much they’ve changed over the decades and are somehow still sprouting the same bullshit, they talk of habits that used to be self-evident and are now considered odd and vice versa. Harry tries to explain social media and Louis finds delight in Harry’s refusal to write texts in any other way than a formal email, they argue about a film they both saw in the early two-thousands, in short: They have a grand ol’ time.

Only when Louis comes back from having a wee she frowns at Harry, hands stemmed into her hips. “Why don’t you have a single plant in here?”

And then Harry has to lie her way around confessing that every single flower, every floral smell had reminded her so much of her that it inevitably would always make her sad or angry. She pins it to her inability to nourish plants according to their needs.

 

 

-*-

 

 

Louis meets Niall and Zayn on a Sunday evening. Harry had collected her from the station mere minutes ago and now they’re climbing up the stairs towards the couple’s flat, a big backpack in tow. It’s filled with two bottles of blood, and several jars of honey, glass clinking together with every step she makes. A large bouquet sits in Louis’ arms, lilies of the valley, purple cornflowers and sage among lush ferns. “You’re really charming them,” Harry quips once they’ve reached the right floor. High ceilings allow the tall windows to brighten the dark tapestry; yellow ornaments embellish the banister. It’s the same colour as the doormat welcoming them in.

“They probably won’t even get the message, will they.”

She snickers, tempted to lie and whisper wrong meanings into Zayn’s ear later tonight. “Absolutely not, you could bring them tansies and they’d thank you.”

“I would never do that,” Louis says scandalised, but there’s a glint in her eyes as she knocks.

Harry’s still grinning at her, when Niall opens up, cheerfully embracing them in greeting. 

“Going in for the hugs, I can appreciate that,” Harry hears Louis say as she bends down to get rid of her shoes. She doesn’t bother introducing them, they’ve basically met via her account, besides, Niall is already chatting gallantly. It smells heavenly of warm food, roasted vegetables and spicy rice, which means that Zayn must’ve been cooking, is indeed tipping around the corner with an apron tied around her waist. It clashes beautifully with the red dress she’s wearing, colourful stains covering the geometrical pattern.

“’m Zayn,” she says, hand outstretched, but Louis is already embracing her, mumbling something about equality. Above her shoulder, Zayn smirks at Harry and does some kind of approving nod. Niall mirrors it and grins, urging them down the hallway and towards the set table, asking about their day.

It irks Harry, the two of them pretending like she brought a new girl home, as if Louis is a stranger all of them still have to judge and impress.  Unsurprisingly, they have no clue whatsoever about the meaning of the flowers Louis thrusts into their hands, bouquet now standing on top of the kitchen island. Zayn in particular is very interested in learning about it, though, occupied with mixing some kind of sauce, asking distracted questions. Her voice is quiet and deliberate, as always, but there is something worrisome in it, some kind of bone-deep exhaustion. Thankfully, Harry has brought some blood with her. It was a special offer she saw at the market, something in the blend imitating wine, so she gets away with it, Niall only huffing once before she gets some fancy glasses.

During dinner, in which Niall eats, Louis eats a bit, and Zayn and Harry don’t eat the food at all, they pretty much run through all obligatory questions: who met whom when and where (a mess), which decade is the best in terms of music (a debate), which decade was the most eventful one (even more of a debate), whether Niall and Zayn plan on getting married (they’ve basically proposed), and the awful ways in which their government has let them down. And Harry’s dramatics.

“She once hopped inside a carriage to woo a Countess,” Louis rats her out, gleefully gesturing with a fork in her hands. “She wasn’t even sure whether she was truly in there, just fucking opened the door and jumped in like some crazyhead.”

“That was one of my romantic peaks,” Harry says, feigning satisfaction and sloshing around the blood in her glass elegantly.

Zayn’s fangs are elongated and her words are slurred, slightly. “What happened, after? D’you two have an affair?” She’s either drunk or overwhelmed by the first proper sip of blood that doesn’t hurt her. 

“Well, no. We had intercourse in that carriage, and then we never saw each other again. I think she was only staying for a visit.”

Niall cackles loud: “Intercourse?”

“See,” Louis chimes in, before Harry can defend herself. “Harry doesn’t fuck people, she has very proper and posh intercourse with them.”

“In carriages,” Niall says, and the two of them burst into laughter. All she can do is join them, secretly relieved about hearing Louis speak like this. In the eighties, she would only talk in cold condescension about the people Harry fell into bed with, would console her after another morning waking up alone, but urge her to stop throwing her heart at the feet of meaningless strangers. What she didn’t understand back then is how Harry hadn’t had any control to stop herself from responding to advances, from trying to chase away the emptiness within her with a night out. It seems like they’re able to talk about it now.

Maybe it’s because all throughout the evening they themselves have exchanged lingering looks, touches that last just a split second too long, a smile that won’t go away. 

When the small amount of food that Zayn had cooked in the first place has been eaten - Zayn and Louis have moved to the couch, joyful banter and smell of sugary sweets drifting to the kitchen where Harry has been watching Niall wash the dishes – Niall asks her whether she and Louis have kissed yet. Grateful for the sloshing water, she whisper-tells that she strongly suspects Louis is attracted to her, has an increased heartbeat whenever Harry looks at her in a certain way. She tells her about last Thursday, when they went to get ice-cream and to stroll through the park, about wiping away some chocolate-mint from Louis’ mouth and the two of them standing in the path like some lost statues. She tells her about the texts she’s getting every noon, most often an update on the job hunt Louis has started to begin or the well-being of the bees by the tower, but sometimes a simply heart emoji. She tells her of the small dances Louis will start randomly, suddenly taking Harry’s hand and twirling her. The more she talks, the giddier she gets, excitement rushing through her.

It must show, because Louis pulls her onto the couch with a teasing smirk: “You look happy, Babe.”

Preening under the endearment, she presses up against Louis’ side, flutters her lashes. “I am! ‘M so happy.” She smacks her lips. “You’re here.”

Zayn scoffs and Louis looks like she might mock her, too, but what she ends up doing is a fond little smile that transforms Harry’s insides into chaos. A haze rushes to her head, making her a little giddy, a little uncoordinated.  They’re so close together she can practically taste the Sohan Halwa Louis has been nibbling on, can see the sugary sheen of the dessert on her lips. “I’m happy, too,” Louis whispers, and brushes one of her sticky fingers over her temple.

Harry hums pleased, and ignores the look Zayn and Niall are exchanging behind their shoulders. Everything is warm and fulfilling, and it smells so, so good with her nose pressed into soft cotton and the flower bouquet and the spices still hanging in the air, and three of her favourite people in the entire world by her side. In this moment, she doesn’t think about the losses she’s had to go through.

The others eventually realise that she’s drifted off, are now quietly talking about things that matter too much and too little, Niall occasionally getting up to refill their glasses or to sort out the Sohan Halwa or to press a kiss to Zayn’s forehead. She refuses to let anyone get up, even presses down on Harry’s shoulder when she voices a mumbled offer to help. But that’s normal, that’s the way it is, and what’s also normal is the way Louis’ side fits against Harry’s body, her tummy soft under her idly hands, her breathing measured. Only when her fingers dip a bit too low, play with the invisible hairs leading down from her bellybutton, does her breath hitch, does her heart stumble. It has Harry pressing her tongue against her fangs.

Her attention is once captured by the conversation when Louis and Zayn fall into a discussion on feeling alienated by the culture in this land, on having trouble to combine their upbringing with what is expected of them in a humancentred, heteronormative and, in Zayn’s case, white society. At this point Niall and Harry simply listen, watching their loved ones with quiet interest. It must have shown on her face, that layered love. Because it is what Zayn addresses before Harry and Louis leave, asking the same question her girlfriend had asked but simply humming in answer to Harry’s negative reply, then kisses her cheek.

Louis and her thank the couple profusely maybe a bit too old-fashioned, maybe a bit too earnestly. It gets them hugs encased in laughter, they’re shooed through the door, grins all around.

On the street, Harry inhales deeply and angles her face towards the moon. It’s not quite full, tears of clouds hiding some of its big craters. But the sky around it is glowing in a soft white, and if she squints, if she really concentrates then she can see it smiling back at her.

“Did you have fun?”, Louis asks, slinging an arm around hers.

She looks down at her, hair free of petals for once because she had fussed over getting them all out to appear prim and proper. “I did,” she says. “Did you? Do you like them?”

Their steps echo on the pavement, the neighbourhood quiet and gentrified, modern houses towering over them and hiding the dark clouds behind flat rooftops. A milky blur, the blur of all big cities, colours the sky in a faint red, not one star bright enough to penetrate it.

“Yeah, they’re both very sweet girls. I dunno if they’re too smart tho, with the way they’re handling that blood allergy.”

“I know,” she whispers, tightening her hold on Louis’ arm. “I offered them some of mine. But they refuse to take more. It’s probably not the best option either, cuz, like, it’s made for my body. But it can’t be worse than starving yourself.”

“You can’t force them to take your aid,” Louis says tightly. They’ve slowed down, tube station visible at the end of the block, street lights elongating their shadows, playing tricks with them.

“I – obviously, I know that, but. I just wanna… do something.”

Louis makes a small noise. “You always wanna do something. You always got stuck in your own head when you wanted to help.”

They’re both thinking about the second war, about screeching fights and stubborn arguments and Harry urging them to take in just one more wounded soldier, to drive just a bit closer to the front-line, despite the car loudly groaning and growling beneath the weight of men who were groaning and growling even louder. But in that time Louis was also the one who convinced the rest of their Unit of Harry’s plans. “You’d do the same thing, if you were able to.”

“I would,” Louis admits, and now that they’re standing by the station, the screeching of wheels on the tracks drowns her out. “But I wouldn’t tie my own self-worth to it.”

Harry stares at her, lips falling open. In the back of her throat something starts to strain.

“Not every pain in others is tied to you,” Louis keeps going and it pleases Harry to feel seen and understood, but it also makes tears prick in the corners of her eyes, turns her mouth dry and unmoving. Because Louis is clearly talking about herself, is directly telling her to take a step back, to stop worrying and she doesn’t know if she could ever be capable of doing so.

“Your pain will always be mine,” she rasps out, clasping Louis’ elbows, frowning. It’s because she’s staring so intently, that she sees the sharp flicker, the slight tightening of her jaw.

“My pain is my own, and I can choose to share it with you. Which I have. God, Harry, I just want you to realise that you’re living in a world that doesn’t exist anymore. You’re safe. _We_ are safe.”

Harry almost presses a kiss to Louis’ lips at those words, almost pulls her in and claws her nails into her soft skin, but she resists the surging energy in her limbs, resists letting her brain drift into a space where nothing but holding Louis matters. “I -,” she inhales shakily. “God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s just -. I don’t think I will ever forget how it feels to worry about your safety.”

At that Louis grasps her right back, pressing her warm hands onto Harry’s neck, thumbs digging into her jaw: “I’m safe. And I love you.” Despite knowing that it is meant in a platonic way, that last bit still makes her gasp, so she hides it in Louis’ hair, finally embraces her completely.  
“I love you, too,” she says, focusing on imprinting this moment into her memory.

It smells like fumes and dirty steel and city filth, but also faintly of Zayn’s meal and sage and Louis’ warmth. It could be anywhere in the world right now, anywhere in any city. The tubes underground are shaking up the earth, the rustling of busy people heard even at this hour, but the steady thump of Louis’ heart is ingratiating. It echoes in her mind, makes her own chest vibrate as though something inside it came to life. She could tilt up Louis’ chin, stoop a bit, and they would be kissing. Her tongue can discern the resonance of wine and blood, but it also nearly tingles with the desire to know Louis’ taste.

Her lips already glide along Louis’ forehead, wandering down to her temples, when Louis withdraws, lashes cast low. Her gaze is just a hint of glassy, fingers trembling where they press into Harry’s shoulders. “We should get home,” she says, and smiles.

They wander down the station, waiting in silence, and only exchanging a good night when Harry has to get off the train first.

 

 

-*-

 

 

Harry’s at the kitchen counter looking for something other than straight vodka, sugary sodas, or cheap beer. This is why she doesn’t go to gatherings hosted by people so young.  But Louis had expressed the desire to experience a proper party - and since Niall and Zayn finally got a conclusive answer on the synthesised blood it was done and decided. Glittery garlands and rainbow tinsels are draped from the ceiling, reflected in the windowpanes just like the fairy lights and gleaming eyes of the occasional werewolf. The sleek furniture, all beige faux leather, shimmering steel and discreet blues, is scattered with strewn crisps, forlorn bottles, and a dozen of listeners trying to enjoy the strumming of a guitarist over the booming music coming from the living room.  It’s a bit unpleasant to the ears, but the floor is crowded with people either succeeding to move to the beat or proudly failing.

Louis is sitting at the kitchen island, back turned to the guitarist and, additional to the usual petals, bits of lametta in her fringe. Her fingers play with the cork of a wine bottle, manoeuvring it through the bowls of snacks and sweets, twisting it like a spinning top. She’s talking about the forest, eyes bright and fond. The person who is listening to her earnestly lays a hand atop of hers.

Harry reaches for the wine, accidentally knocking the bottom of it against the elbow of the human. “Oh, pardon me.”

The girl shrugs one shoulder: “Nah, no prob.”

Who even says ‘prob’? Young people, that’s who. She’s probably never used a real telephone in her life.

Louis flicks the cork at Harry, she quickly catches it between thumb and forefinger and revels in the impressed look the human gives her. “We’ve, ah, I’ve talked about the serenity of the trees. Really, I don’t understand how you can live in a city for more than a few years, H.”

She frowns, dropping the cork in between peanuts coated in coloured chocolate. Concentrates on finding a wine glass. “You know exactly why, Lou.”

“It’s the 21th century, Babe, you can order blood from everywhere now. To any place.”

The human laughs. Long. “Or go hunt for some on your own.” More laughing.

There are no fucking wine glasses. Jaw clenched, Harry steals Louis’ plastic cup and fills it up with the red liquid. Droplets of it spill on her nails, onto her shoes, ruining the fabric. If that needs dry-cleaning to wash out she’ll send the bill to the girl whose laughter is finally dying.

“No one does that anymore, jeez, Harry’s not a criminal.”

The wine tastes faintly of citrus bear. Harry also imagines tasting the imprints of lips on the cup. “It means,” disrupting Louis, who is trying to explain to that ignorant girl how a vampire doesn’t need human blood to thrive. “That I’m not reliant on the willingness of humans to grant me my existence.”

She can see Louis’ sly grin, but the girl looks like she might have skipped some classes in middle school. “What’d you mean? What has our willingness to do with it, you can just take our blood, can’t you? I mean, you’re stronger.”

Harry stares at her in disbelieve. “Why the fuck would I ever do that?”

“That’s -... because that’s what your kind does?”

“My kind.”

“Hey,” Louis looks at the girl with a tight expression, and the side of her trainer suddenly presses up against Harry’s shin. “Don’t be rude. Humans are not the only people with a moral compass. Or the only ones affected by the law.”

Harry snorts, thinking of the hundreds of Vampires locked up in prison because of minor misconducts. “ _Your kind_ really can’t make up its mind about wanting to fuck us or making us responsible for every little crime.”

There might be regret in the girl’s eyes, remorse even, but Harry has long given up on trying to educate humans that show such huge gaps in politics. She squeezes Louis’ upper arm, mumbles something about joining the hip crowd again, and chugs down half her wine before turning around. Once she has opened the door to the hall, a blast of music hits her senses, making her body tingle. Why waste her time when she can shut off her mind?

“Okay,” she hears Louis start as she slips out of the kitchen. “Let me try to explain it like this.”

Louis has always been the fighter between them.

 

 

-*-

 

 

“You have awful taste in lovers.”

“I do not. And I forbid you to call that stupid girl a lover, I’d rather punch than kiss her.”

During the day, the tower transforms into a sanctuary. Quiet. Removed from all the noise. Plants reaching out for her like arms welcoming her home. The tree she is leaning up against has a smooth bark, surface almost velvety and sprinkled with spots of golden brown, like freckles. Its leaves are lush and big, shielding her from the direct sun beaming through the windows. They throw shadows across Louis’ body, parts of her glinting in the warm light and others looking cool and inviting. Her dress is the white flimsy thing again, riding high on her legs, especially in the way she’s lying on the floor like this, thighs spread and hands buried in the soil by her head, lids closed.

Harry loosens her shoulders. “Fuck, me too.”

“You slept with a lot of people since -. Since the nineties?”

She considers stretching out the truth, but ultimately all that matters is that Louis knows her. “No, not at all. Can’t really create the connection with anyone. I’ve…”

“But you’ve been wanting to?”

A butterfly flits from a group of lilacs by the overgrown stove up into the air, around the twigs of the white tree back down again to a bush of common myrtle. This is her chance. “Not really. Well, uhm, I’ve been looking for, for something else these, uh, the past years.”

Louis’ left hand leaves the soil, searches for a moment, then clasps around Harry’s calf. “What, like…” Harry’s gaze draws along the line of her nose, the curve of her lips. Louis’ tongue darts out. “Like love?”

At the word, Louis’ heart skips a beat. Harry hears the stumble of it loud and clear. She strokes one finger along the sweep of Louis’ fringe. “You disapprove?”

“No, no, I just – I thought, after Vivien, you were always going to… stay alone, I mean – no, no, not stay alone, but. I thought you didn’t want a relationship after that,” she grins, lopsided. “Thought I could keep you all to myself forever and ever.”

She lets her finger travel over Louis’ lid, down the row of light lashes, down to the triangle of freckles on her cheek. “Now that you’re back, you’ll always be my priority.” It speeds up now, Louis’ heart. Harry fumbles: “But, like you don’t – I don’t have to, uhm. And also, getting used to the city is probably your priority right now.” Silence echoes in confirmation.  
“How long will you stay?” Harry dares to ask.

Louis sighs. “I dunno, Harry. If I feel the need to get out of the city, I will.”

It hurts. It hurt to have her say it casually, so flippantly, as if nothing is tying her to this place.

“Will you tell me, this time? Before you leave?” It slips out. She wants to take it back, wants to avoid the conversation it inevitably will provoke.

“The fuck does that mean?”

“You just left,” Harry’s voice breaks. “You just, you just fucking left me for three decades without ever telling me why, I went out of my mind.”

“You were already out of your mind before I left. Before I -… before I realised you’d never listen to me, not even when you spent every night getting so drunk you – You didn’t even notice how little we saw each other.” She’s not looking at Harry, eyes still closed, but her lips are pressed together, voice bitter and cold and brutal. 

“I always noticed,” she says quietly, reaching out.

“And still you –“, Louis opens her eyes now, blue cutting and sharp, muscles in her shoulders tight, arms trembling just a hint

“What?” Harry sits up on her haunches. “What, Louis?”

Tentatively, she puts three fingers on Louis’ ribcage, her whole hand when it earns her a shaking breath and the slackening of her body. The dress clings to her sweaty skin, no opportunity to cool off in the warmth of the evening. They should get ice cream, she thinks haphazardly, and focuses on the rise and fall of restless breaths.  
Louis lays her hand atop of Harry’s. Her words come out in a whisper. “I know better now, but. But back then, I … it felt like you knew I needed you, and you let us drift apart. I couldn’t -, I couldn’t face you and say goodbye, I just couldn’t. But I will tell you, I promise I will tell you when I leave again, I’m sorry I didn’t back then. I truly am sorry.”

_I felt like you knew I needed you, and you let us drift apart._ It’s what she was expecting all this time, it’s no surprise and it’s definitely reasonable. It still makes her feel ashamed. “You weren’t the only one who fucked up”, she says. “Somehow – somehow I can’t ever do what’s best for you. I want what’s best for you, whether that’s in this city or away from it. I just… I would just like to be part of your life. In any way you want me.” Her body feels like it might fall apart, but it doesn't visibly shake. The fingers on Louis’ ribcage are still below Louis’ hand. “I understand why you left.”

“Thank you, Babe,” Louis whispers, heart racing, eyes closing again. “Thank you. I won’t leave for some time, I promise. And when I do, we’ll still be friends.”

 “Yeah,” she says, but what she’s thinking about has only so much to do with friendship. The white dress is so transparent in some places, leaves so little unsaid, barely covering Louis’ nipples and falling softly down her shoulders, bellybutton visible as her tummy rises in synch with her breaths.

After a beat, Louis’ hand tightens around her leg again. “I want to be a part of your life, too. You know that.”

Harry melts. Careful to avoid crushing the flowers, she curls up next to her, cheek resting on the back of her hands. Her knee presses into Louis’ hip, the hairs on her own thighs now cast golden with the same spots of light that illuminate the curve of Louis’ breasts. She follows the flickering of the beams, rays of raw affection drifting through her:  “Let’s go hiking, yeah? Get you away from here. There are some woods not too far out.”

“Oh, Babe,” Harry stays still despite the dirt smudged on Louis’ fingers, fingers that caress her arm. “You and your tender heart.”

There is no heart beating inside of her, but it might as well have grown to press against her lungs and trap the air in them. 

 

 

-*-

 

 

Above the treetops to her right, the sun rises in a pale yellow, lifting the grey sheen of dawn. It turns the leaves translucent, thin arteries glowing as they are traced by the light, barely casting shadows against the rich bark of the trees, or the floor of the forest, crisp winds teasing fallen greeneries. It won’t be this breezy for long, the heat starts sinking from the sky, ready to wrap itself around every being and penetrate every surface. But for now they are seizing the fresh air and wandering through the trees in aimless serenity, stillness dulling their steps. Louis is at the front, paving the way for them and avoiding as many saplings as she can, feet so light on the ground it seems as if she is floating. The petals softly falling from her hair are leaving a trail as she nudges the flowers growing from the soil, encouraging them to make space for themselves. She leaves a trail of flourish.

Liam noticeably tries to avoid stepping on the plants, but, like Harry, they distort their face in shame every now and then, guilty eyes glued to the tip of their boots. “Don’t worry,” Harry says so quietly Louis’ ears won’t be able to discern it. “She says it’s a part of it, she won’t hold it against you.”

“Fuck, man. This doesn’t even feel like a hike, more like something spiritual. A spirit walk.”

They laugh soundlessly, and Louis looks back, amused smile in her sparkling eyes. It freezes Harry’s grin in place, lets the breath in her lungs thicken. Liam shoves her knowingly and she tumbles forward, accidentally crushing a youthful acacia and stretching Louis’ shirt as she clutches it. She throws a pout in the direction of Liam’s cackle, but smooths out her features as she breathes: “G’morning.”

“Mornin’ again,” Louis says charmingly. “You’ve been very quiet today.”

“Just taking in the – everything,” she flutters her hands, pointing towards a bush brandishing purple blossoms, a bird watching them quietly through the twigs of an oak, a pronounced ray of sunshine that falls onto a moss covered rock.

“You could come here whenever you want.”

She shrugs one shoulder. “Yeah, I -. I guess.”

They had driven out in Liam’s car, a one hour ride on an ordinary highway passing petrol stations and wind turbines, day awaking as they had come down from a night spent at Harry’s flat, drinking wine and playing cards. To her satisfaction, Louis and Liam got along seamlessly, banter rising in all the places their personalities clashed. All three of them are horribly competitive, games escalating into small disputes rather rapidly, and eventually they left the mess on the table to spread out on the sofa. Hours of conversation had followed, Liam and Louis discussing their complicated relationship to femininity and womanhood, Harry listening carefully. They exchanged anecdotes about the nineties, and those were the minutes she grew quieter as she had listened to them gush about music and baggy jeans and gay icons.

“I’m just really glad you’re back,” she says, hooking her pointer finger into Louis’ belt loop. “And I just wanna look at you all day. To make sure you’re real.”

Louis’ mouth scrunches, before she tackles Harry’s side, squeezing all the air out of her lungs and nearly catapulting them into some bushes – if Harry wasn’t so very strong and coordinated and attentive, of course. They stroll through the forest attached at the hip, Liam trailing behind them, taking photographs with their fancy phone once in a while. She’d feel bad about ignoring them, if she wouldn’t be sure that this is completely intentional on their part, probably a scheme to get them to confess their eternal love for each other or some other romantic notion.

After another hour, they reach an opening among the trees. It’s covered in sprigs and fallen leaves, foliage turning into mud at the edges of a small river curling around a few rock formations. The water sloshes in tiny streams, trickling away from the main current in thin arteries and eventually disappearing into the distance. The blue of the sky is mirrored in some rough swirls, but for the most part the tree tops are reflected in the gentle waves, bopping up and down as if they’re dancing. Right in the middle of the clearing a patch of wildflowers stretches upwards, dozens and dozens of hues and textures, and all sorts of blossoms emitting an alluring smell.

“Damn,” Liam remarks, and immediately snaps a photograph.

Though, it’s not as fast as Louis’ reaction, who took off her shoes at an impressive speed and is now digging her toes into the earth, arms outstretched. “This is fucking orgasmic!”

Harry screws up her face in fondness, presses her hands to her mouth and keens. “You’re adorable.”

Louis is beaming: “I’m fucking _awesome_.”

God, she is. A breeze sweeps through her hair, litters the petals all around, spreading them like pollen. Already, a few plants begin to look healthier, lose the brown spots in their stems or regain the vividness of their colours.

“Honestly, I don’t know if I’m confused by this nature-kin stuff, or extremely jealous of it,” Liam looks like an exotic bird with their patterned crop top, buzzed hair, and funky make-up. “Do you, like, get off on feeling the earth?”

An honest, exploding guffaw bursts out of Harry, hands now covering her whole face. “Oh God,” she repeats and repeats, trying to blend out Louis’ screeching.

“No, fuck, no!” If this wasn’t a friend, she sure would start beating Liam to the ground. “Why’s that always a thing, why do people think that??”

“I dunno, man, you just almost came on the spot!”

“Because it’s like – I’m finally getting something good after living off of trash for the last weeks, it’s not sexual, the fuck.”

“Wait, so it’s actually like food for you??”

Harry dares to look between the gaps of her fingers, sees Louis’ hands akimbo, brows raised to the sky. “Why so shocked, blood-sucking, undead person?”

It gets Liam quiet at once. They open and close their mouth a few times, before shrugging loosely. “Fair ‘nough. But you don’t have to be like... a tree … in tree form to get the… minerals?”

Louis just stares at them, chin jerking to call attention to the flowers tickling up her ankle. Her shoes lie discarded in the grass, and it leaves her in washed up shorts and a simple shirt, sweat clinging in the fabric between her breasts. Harry releases the lip she had sucked into her mouth and pushes Liam, getting revenge. But, since they aren’t on a diet of synthesised blood, they soon have her in a headlock, ridiculing her efforts to free herself. They only let off once she pinches them in the butt, screaming of unfair tactics like they have any right. Both of them are breathless when they notice Louis’ closed eyes, her body now slack.

Upon Liam’s confused look, Harry lets go and tips nearer, lays a hand on Louis’ ribcage, speaks softly. “We can wait, if you wanna. We’ll just stay here and you regain some energy, okay?”

Louis’ lashes cling together when she blinks her eyes open. They droop down, once, to Harry’s lips, before losing focus. “Yeah,” she mumbles, already so far out of it. “’m gonna.”

“Okay, Sweetheart,” she adds the endearment with a hitch in her breath, but Louis smiles, she smiles, she smiles, mouth soft and rosy. “You wanna stay here?”

It has been a while since she has seen her in her other body, and it was never in the presence of someone else. There’s a level of trust to it that most Nymphs need decades to build up, understandably so. It’s not even the transformation itself, strange and wonderful and touching in its nature, but the vulnerability that they are left with, the utter exposure, no way to defend themselves against people. Humans. Harry is well aware that her own natural self, the lethal, hungry, senseless vampire is quite the contrast to that peaceful stillness.

“Gonna walk back a bit, like. To that fallen tree. With. With the roots growing up,” Louis slurs those words but before she stumbles away her eyes regain intent for one split second, boring into Harry’s. “Don’t leave.”

“I won’t,” Harry whispers, and lets her go.

Seeing her disappear does not come with worry or pain. She knows that in this surroundings, Louis is home. She knows that not a single living organism in this forest would ever want to harm her, and she’d sense human danger if it, against all odds, would arise. She knows that Louis will come back to her, despite the uncertainty of how long she’ll have to wait.

It shakes her up a bit, that last thought. Lets her forget Liam who whistles to get her attention, then tickles her armpits. “You two are so fucking intense, it’s almost weird. You get all mushy when she’s with you, I kinda feel like I need to fuck off.”

“No,” she draws out, snaps back into reality. “Don’t, don’t, we don’t mean to do that.”

“What, you’ve been like that forever?”

“No, ‘course not.” But she doesn’t want to think about that right now, doesn’t want to taint this beautiful day with such self-indulgent sadness and regret. Therefore, she steers the conversation towards politics, always interesting to argue and chat about to Liam, always a safe way to ensure both of their attention.

It leads them to animate discussions, first by a cleared spot of grass and then by the river, dunking their feet into the cold water. The day has fully encompassed the heat by now, stifling air sultry beneath the trees, slowing down their movements.

Liam leans back, palms pushing into the grass and it directs Harry’s gaze to their wrist where the tattoo usually sits. “Does it hurt you much? That you have to re-trace the memory of your sister every day?”

“I totally… “ They frown, then bring up their arm to inspect it. “Ah, yeah, it does. That’s the one thing I can’t stand about being a vampire. The blood I can stomach” – they both chuckle – “and the first year of adjusting to the human sleeping rhythm was a fucking pain in the arse, but that’s gotten easier. And… well, the death thing is pretty annoying, too. But loss is a part of anyone’s life, isn’t it, whether human and short-lived or non-human.”

Vivien’s face wafts into her mind, like a reflection on the river. “You really made your peace with that?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it peace,” they say.

“But you’re not held back by it?”

Harry watches as they shrug, painted toes toying with a smooth cobble in the water. “I miss my students the second they graduate and I never get to see their annoying faces again, if I’d let sadness about losing people control my life I’d be shit at life in general. Shit at myy job and going out’ve the house in general. Not that that’s the same.”

A cypress stands by the edge of the clearing, stretching high towards the sky. It reminds her of endless funerals and cemeteries, and lonely graves for those among her friends who had been cast away from their families. “I just wish I had the ability to cherish them,” she whispers. “So many of them are so far away from me, I can’t honour them, I can’t -… I guess, it’s about feeling useless, you know. Not being able to do anything at all.”

“That’s why I do this,” they say, waving their wrist. “It’s a neat compromise of remembering her and allowing myself to go about my day.”

“You saying I’m holding myself back?” As soon as she asks it, she knows she’s said what she needed to hear. It was not just the pain of Louis leaving, it was so many people whose loss she had been carrying around, not allowing herself to grieve and to process. Instead, she had been angling that grieve at herself. Is angling it at herself.

“You needa find some ways to cope. Stop hating on the vampire in you and start hating the world! Embrace the shittiness and then fight it!”

“Oh, I hate the world plenty,” she retorts and they laugh the laugh of people who are unwilling to give up, unwilling to let themselves be trampled into the poisoned earth of a society that hates them, and then they’re inevitably talking of politics again, sharing their rage.

Liam has their pants rolled up to the knees and is standing in the middle of the small stream, sloshing water at Harry, when Louis emerges again. Her light footsteps are audible first, then a soft humming. The sound of it almost makes Harry’s soaked clothes worth it, makes up for the dull echo of her pain about loss and lack of control of her fears. What makes both seem non-existent is the sight she gets when she turns around. Heat pools in her abdomen, because. Because Louis is naked.

All inches of her golden skin are exposed, rays of sun flitting over it as she walks closer. Moreover, the light flickers over the pink petals - exactly like the ones of the white tree in the turret - sticking to the junctures of her body. Everything about her takes Harry’s breath away.

“This might be the first time I get to see a lady naked this fast,” Liam comments.

It’s such a lie, Liam is basically the master of one night stands, but it makes Louis laugh so Harry lets it slide. “You’re welcome. To be honest, I don’t really get why you guys have such problems with nudity.”

“Oh, I really don’t have a problem with that,” Liam says, and it would make Harry feel jealous if her emotions weren’t occupied with reacting to Louis suddenly being very naked, very close, and very careless about the way she’s towering over her, midriff right in her face. Frantically, Harry tries to ignore the way her pubes darken the nearer they get towards her thighs, the way her nipples look invitingly perky from this perspective.

There are tiny fish in the water. They hush down against the current, glittering tails straining against the pressure. Harry stares at them until she can feel Louis sitting down next to her, deems it safe now that her mind has calmed down a bit. Until she breathes in again and her mind is clouded with a rosy fog.

“I didn’t expect you of all people to feel weird about me being naked,” Louis says quietly and Harry amusedly gasps out a puff of air.

“You don’t really believe that I feel weird, do you?”

Liam laughs: “Yeah, Louis, you don’t really think that’s the reason why Harry looks like she’s gonna faint?”

She does _not_ – Harry does not faint. Indignantly, she kicks water in Liam’s direction but before their expensive pants can get wet, they’ve darted away, laugh all the louder. She curses at them, not at all fondly, not at all thankful for the opportunity to roll her eyes at Louis and share a look of unity. Louis makes a gesture, a kind of _they have a point_ , and smirks at Harry’s agony.

“Hey,” she whines. “Stop being mean, fuck off.”

What she doesn’t expect is Liam actually doing exactly that. “Alright!” They chirp and wade out of the water. “I’ll snap some of those sick trees by that hillside we walked by. Maybe write some songs, ya know, get the juice flowing.”

Louis and Harry blink at them. “Sure,” she says slowly. “Get your juice flowing.”

Liam is definitely still in hearing distance, when Louis nudges her with a muscly, very stubbly, very naked thigh.  “Alright, what’re they up to? Is this a hint? Did you two plan something?”

Harry gets lost in studying the bows of Louis’ lips. If she keeps looking at it, maybe all their shared history would be rewritten.

The first time they had shared a bed was after a long Friday evening of discussing literature and art with a salon full of modernists, Parisian pastry heavy in their stomachs, sky too dark for their hostess to let them leave despite their inhuman strength, and their familiarity with the neighbourhood. So they scrambled onto the thin mattress in the guest chamber, bedding too expensive and a stark comparison to the linen Harry slept under in her rented room. The noises of the night had drifted in, but all she was able to hear was Louis’ heartbeat and shaking breaths. Exactly like she can hear them now. Except, they’re surrounded by calm energy, a clashing of bird sounds, and insects humming, and branches creaking, and wind rustling, and water tricking, all coming together in harmony.

Back then, neither of them had acted upon their mutual attraction and eventually, it faded. Eventually, both of them fell in love with other people. But now, the longing in Harry’s chest has been answered. Now, Louis is back and she has a patient look in her eyes, an awaiting gleam.

And then she says something extraordinary.

“So you really do wanna kiss me, huh?”

And Harry exhales, nods. Yes. “Yes, I do,” she says.

“Good. I want you to,” Louis says. Quiet.

So she does. Their lips are slack, gently prodding against each other, the bare touch sending shivers down Harry’s spine, into her hands, into the tips of her fingers. Cautiously, she lays them on top of Louis’ knee, hums as Louis turns, rearranges herself to sit cross-legged, draws her in again. It doesn’t make up for the past eight years, this kiss, but in a strange contradiction it makes up for the past century. Inevitably, this is where they would always end up. Amidst the trees, mouths connected, Louis’ hands in the depth of her curls, Harry’s hands on her legs, tracing patterns into her skin.

She doesn’t dare open her eyes, doesn’t dare to nudge her tongue further than the chapped curve of Louis’ lips, in concern of becoming overwhelmed by her senses. It’s not her fangs she is worried about, it’s the warmth tangling in her tummy, sinking lower and lower. It’s the idea of Louis’ sweat glistening in the sun, of her looking as beautiful as she is smelling, honey sweet. She can’t think of a single reason to let go.

After endless minutes have passed, after her back has been aching with the twist of her body for a long time, Louis’ breathing gets heavier, her fingers start to toy with the same curl behind Harry’s ear repetitively. “I’ve missed you.”

It’s the first time she has initiated it. The first time, and it’s low and earnest and tinged with something raw and open. With a sob, Harry finally opens her eyes; finds Louis’ blue ones already looking back at her, finds them watery and wide. “I’ve missed you, too.”

Harry lays her thumbs on Louis’ cheeks, strokes them gently, reassuring herself of the reality of this moment, of the faint heartbeat thrumming beneath her skin, of the constellations of freckles on her nose, of her own peaceful mind. Even the constant ache in her chest is nothing but an echo, an echo that brushes between the spaces of her ribs, that is filled with affection. They don’t get up for a long time.

 

 

-*-

 

 

Harry can’t have good things. The universe, simply said, is against her. Zayn disagrees, as she is whining all throughout lunch, but she is sure of it. The universe, the stars, the moon, they all know that she’s a hopeless, pining fool. And they take delight in her suffering, that’s what they do.

“One might think with your long lifespan, you’d be in less of a hurry to get into Louis’ pants,” Niall says, stretching in her chair.

She’s wearing a tie with cats on it, it’s the most spectacular thing, but Harry is unwilling to let it brighten her mood. She will suffer at it, and she will bear the weight of rejection as long as she can. “She regrets kissing me.”

“When’d she tell you that?” Niall asks, sneaking an arm around her girlfriend’s waist. Zayn is wearing shades, and it makes her seem unapproachable and cool and mysterious, and it’s a wall Harry would normally try to break but not today. Today she is going to be sad and lonely.

“Her silence is loud enough.”

“I don’t ever want to be in a fight with you.”

“Why, thanks, Zaynie, I don’t ever want to be in a fight with you either.”

“No, I mean,” Zayn lifts and drops one shoulder. “You interpret stuff into things that are, like, the most stupid. If you’d pull that shit on me, I’d actually go off radar.”

Harry’s mouth falls open. “Wow.” She didn’t sign up for someone else increasing her pain, no, she did not. “Fuck, that’s... uhm. Wow.”

“I’m jus’ saying, give Louis some time. And stop wallowing.”

“I thought you were the mean girlfriend,” Harry says to Niall, pouting.

“I’m still the mean girlfriend and I’m proud to have such a wonderful, beautiful lover.”

They coo at each other, as if they’re going to fly off the rooftop any minute, ascending into the air as two love birds. And Harry will be left alone at the table, a glass of water before her, a sad caramel pudding waiting to be eaten and never picked up. She is an unwanted caramel pudding liquefying in the sun.  Worst of all, she can’t remember if Louis even likes caramel. Maybe Louis only likes it occasionally, or combined with something sweeter, or only on special occasions.

Scowling, she looks at the skyline, sudden hate overcoming her at the sight of steel and concrete and electricity cables. It’s even worse than the sadness upon Louis’ silence, and she welcomes it, lets it gnaw at her insides. She could go… she could go to that club. She’d enjoy it, even, have some fun, sink her fangs into someone’s neck and then in the morning she’d be filled with regret. It would be a way of controlling her emotions, an easy way. A familiar, safe route.

Aghast, Harry downs the water in one go. No, no she will not let that happen again, no she won’t let herself fall into those thought patterns. Zayn asks her if she’s okay, must’ve heard the clenching of her teeth or seen the trembling of her fingers. She doesn’t tell the truth, but proposes a movie night, an option to keep her mind off of things. This is not the first time her brain had tried to force her into old habits, and it won’t be the last, but she damn well will keep fighting it.

 

 

-*-

 

 

_I’m coming over and were gonna talk I hope youre there because I might not get my shit together another time_

_Pls be home fuck_

The doorbell rings. Harry moves to ring Louis up, sluggish, sleep still clinging to her after an early night. It’s just 10pm, sky still blue in some smudges, a green shimmer at the horizon. Only when she hears the footsteps on the stairs, she realises that it’s dark in her flat, furniture cast in hues of blue. The light by the door whirs, so high it could be mistaken for the humming in her own head, the white static spreading through her body. She has been sleeping a lot the past days, sleeping away the desire for fresh blood, sleeping away the desire to latch onto a stranger. It’s not ideal, she should keep herself busy, should throw herself into work or something creative, but it’s better than staring out of the window and listening to the bells of the church merging hour into hour.

“Hi,” she mumbles. An immediate smile tries to tug at her lips, but she wills it down, just for now.

Louis, in a grey tracksuit, inhales strongly. “I don’t want a relationship.”

Harry swallows.

“Or rather,” Louis says. “I don’t think a relationship is good, right now. For neither one of us. Because, well, I just arrived you know and – and one might never know if.. if the city will get too much for me. Eventually. And, and you don’t – you’ve been so in your feelings, so confused. I don’t want a relationship.”

She’s cast in the white light of the stairwell, liveliness washed away. It’s as if she isn’t even fully there, barely emerging from the grey of the walls and the steps behind her, scent stifled by sharp detergent and the unchanged presence of dry dust, cobwebs and city dirt. Harry wants to pull her in, press her nose into her hair and fill the empty spaces behind her ribs with Louis’ steady heartbeat.

“But I do want to kiss you,” Louis says. “And hook up with you. If you, if you want that.” The heartbeat falters, just for an instance.

In Louis’ face a mixture of anticipation and nerves casts a shadow down her cheekbones. She’s honest and open and like the person Harry has known for almost a century. “I want you in my life,” is what she replies. “In whatever way you want to be in it.”

A beam concludes Louis’ shaky huff, and then she’s reaching for Harry through the door, hand coming to rest at her waist where the fabric of her negligee bunches up. “Yeah? You wanna keep kissing me?”

“Wanna keep you,” Harry murmurs, wrapping her arms around Louis’ shoulders. Her chin comes to rest at her clavicles, cold nose pressing into Harry’s neck and she can feel the rise and fall of her chest, deep breaths heaving their tummies.

She expects a constriction around her throat any minute, be it because of the unexpected pinnacle to her days of brooding, or Louis’ veiled scent but all she feels is deep content, a satisfied weight in her limbs. “Why were you afraid of coming here?” she asks softly, rocking them slightly.

“I dunno,” Louis says muffled against her skin. It leaves a wet spot that sends the tired attempt of a shiver down her body until it disappears. “All kinds of thoughts that are stupid in hindsight. I thought that, maybe, it was just a kind of in the moment thing. We’ve kissed so many of our friends and – well, I guess this is what I’m proposing here, but I didn’t want it to be a one-time thing. Or…,” she breaks off.

The white light is still humming weakly, its haze alluding to a deep frost clinging to every surface, despite the summer evening.

 “Or?”

Louis’ hands travel up her back, fingers reaching the low fringe of the satin, tracing below Harry’s shoulder blades. “I don’t want it to be meaningless.”

Harry presses her smile into Louis’ hair, a petal tickling her in the corner of her mouth: “Nothing is every meaningless with you.”

“Shut up,” she feels the pinch of a nail at her back. But they stay like that for minutes before she properly pulls Louis inside, offers her her toothbrush and some clothes, constantly touching her. They crawl into bed, spooning like they’ve done countless of times already, duvet covering them in a protective shield. Louis’ arms lie heavy over her waist, her pelvis pressed to Harry’s bum, their hands entangled.

The next morning she takes her time waking up, drifting back into dim dreams repeatedly, blinking her eyes open to Louis’ back to her, the dip of her body contoured by the milky morning sun. It shines murkily through the curtains, blue sky so much more vibrant next to the torn clouds disappearing behind the church tower. She can’t see the streets, just the upper parts of brick buildings and sooty chimneys, a magpie perching on a balcony. While she’s waiting for Louis to stir, she breathes in their mixed scent, lets it lull her into simple ease.

They contemplate their dreams, once Louis has rolled over, hair tousled and skin puffy, making fun of their subconscious, appreciating it. After Harry has had her breakfast, both of them take a shower, and after, the sun has risen significantly, they find themselves on the sofa, making out leisurely.

With every kiss a month of Harry’s concern in the past eight years loses its scarring in the back of her mind, with every whispered conversation, she forgives Louis for ignoring her letters, with every touch she understands more and more that she has been projecting all her desires and fears onto the loss of her best friend instead of facing her reality. Her reality that is a life at the mercy of her own decisions. Her reality that is a longing in her soul for a past that would never repeat itself, fortunately so.

Some of those realisations she shares with Niall, Niall who is as brutally honest as ever, but expresses so much joy and love for Harry’s development that even Zayn seems temporarily confused. The two of them invite her and Louis over again, a day spend in the shared yard of their building complex, basking in the sun. Louis doesn’t initiate affection in front of the couple, but she falls softly into Harry’s arms whenever she hugs her; teases her about her hole-riddled account of a day in the fifties; presses her up against the cool wall in the staircase when they’re told to get fresh ice from the flat and kisses her breathless. “You’re hot when you concentrate,” is what she justifies it with, dazzling sparkles in her eyes.

Several times they get to the point of blown pupils, heated skin, and high moans; sweet scent evading Harry’s senses, a scent she will never forget and thinks of when she falls asleep alone in her bed, but they don’t go further than tentative frottage and reverent hands. She knows both of them want more, knows it because three weeks into her reincarnated happiness, Louis walks into her flat, a clay pot in her hands.

“I can’t sleep in your bed any longer if you don’t have a plant in there. And I especially won’t be _sleeping with you_ , if the only green thing in your home is my own fucking postcard.”

It’s taped to the door of Harry’s closet, that postcard, in her vision whenever she wakes. “You know what I’ve done to the houseplants we’ve had, Lou…”

“Well, you have me for that.” And of course that was the winning argument. Now, a yellow flower pot sits on her bedside table, filled with rich soil and a tiny, tiny sapling fighting its way into the open.

 

-*-

 

 

They are tangled up beneath the trees, the shadow of the white one splitting Louis’ face in half. On one side, her lashes glow golden in the light, on the other the blue in her eyes is dark and stormy. She is panting, one thigh pressed between Harry’s, pressing against her hip and rubbing off on her in circles. Their mouths never really find each other, lips brushing against corners and curves, but never locking. Nevertheless, her breath is sweet on Harry’s tongue, her small noises a song to her ears. Neither of them are moving their hands, Harry’s are grasped in Louis’ sweatpants, Louis’ above Harry’s head as she holds herself up.

“Feels so good,” Louis gasps, biceps trembling. It can’t be due to her feeling physically weak, they’ve only been doing this for minutes.

Their hips glide together, her cunt pulses, slick soaking into her panties and she stifles her moans, forces the thoughts of affection to stay where they are, in her floating mind. But then their nipples brush against each other through the fabric of their shirts, and they’re hard and tingly and Harry moans. “Wanna touch you forever.”

Abruptly, Louis’ lips are very far away and the tickling of her hair on Harry’s forehead is gone. She blinks up, against the rays of sunshine, into the twisted smile in Louis’ face, a tiny little smile with a cruel tilt. “Don’t say that, it sounds so fucking cheesy.”

She goes to open her mouth, but it shuts close before her reply can form because Louis swiftly lifts up her shirt and tosses it away, graceful torso exposed in the light. “Forever is really fucking long for us, you don’t really think that’s a thing, right?” Instead of letting in the hurt that this questions causes her, she takes in the swell of Louis’ stomach, the spaces below her tits where some of her ribs stretch her golden skin, her breasts themselves small and perky, one slightly bigger than the other. She swallows a groan.

“I want to make you come,” Louis says, states it, as a matter of fact. If it weren’t for the gleam in her eyes, the steady blushing of her cheeks, the rushing of her heartbeat she’d seem unaffected.

Harry can’t talk. It’s just. Louis is right there, warmth of her body seeping through hers, fingers digging into her scalp with just the right amount of pressure, scent so sweet and flowery, a hint of daily sweat. She closes her eyes.

“You understand, right?” Louis asks softly, voice very near again.

She makes an uncommitted sound.

“You do?” A kiss on Harry’s cheek. Then on her jaw. Then right below her ear. Inevitably, her hands come to rest on Louis’ waist. “Love is not… it’s not for us.”

Louis’ lips travel down her neck. It makes her mind turn even fuzzier and muddled, her pussy now throbbing, heated because this touch means piercing and sucking and blood, but also intimacy and worship and trust. “We’ve never been able to, to be - in love.” The whisper leaves a stain of spit cooling against the spot someone else’s pulse would be.

Harry shivers, as she realises, what Louis is saying. “You’ve loved, Louis. I have loved. It’s lies -,” a gasp, as Louis nips the skin where her neck meets her shoulder. “They’re lying. They want us to believe we can’t love. That we – that we can’t be loved. But they’re wrong. I feel -, I feel love. And you do, too.”

Louis lets out a dry, raspy sigh, kissing along her cheek again. “Shut up. I know, fuck.”

Their mouths connect, and they’re moving slow and lax, kisses dripping between them. Hands stay where they are, resting, merely holding. A slow current has formed around them, waves that pull them deeper. Eventually, Louis starts to caress her neck again, licking below the edge of her jaw. If Harry would concentrate she would feel every callus on her tongue, could probably count her heartbeats, could notice something other than warmth and desire. Her fingertips find their sweet serenity against the bottom of Louis’ spine. “Feels as if I’ve never touched anyone else,” Harry mumbles, her mouth seeking pressure once more. It doesn’t receive it.

Louis’ fingers clench in Harry’s curls. “I said you need to stop saying stuff like that.” 

So she tightens her grip, lifts up her hips: “I wanna make you come, too.”

“Yeah?” Louis asks, eyes now wide and fully blown, nipples looking so stiff and inviting Harry’s mouth waters.

“Yeah.”

“Fuck.”

And then they’re kissing again, a little bite-y, a little forceful. Then, Louis moves down in a swift motion, lays her warm hands atop Harry’s zipper. “Can I?”

Cautious not to rip out the flowers around her, she grasps her own hair, pulling on it to keep herself grounded. This has been all she could think about for the last couple of nights, this is what she had never dared to think of for all those decades they’ve known each other. Yes, she had fantasies welling up in her ever since meeting Louis, since both of them dressed in nothing but togas, pledging their allegiance to Sappho. But never, not once had she imagined the sight of Louis dragging down her trousers, stroking along the seam of her lace panties, tugging at her carefully trimmed pubic hair. It’s been almost a hundred years of feeling Louis’ breath on her cheeks when they hugged, or Louis’ bare skin whenever they’d change in the same room. But it has never been Louis’ shoulders underneath the back of her knees, or Louis’ hair tickling the insides of her thighs, or Louis’ teeth nipping into her skin.

Harry can’t look away, gaze following the hot tongue outlining the pattern of the red lace, coming closer to her clit, pressing down, firm pressure making her tremble. “Fuck,” she whispers, makes the mistake of taking in a breath of air and getting stunned by their scents mixing with the thousands of smells in the turret.

She can see Louis’ smile, feel it growing when she bucks her hips as she pulls her panties to the side, ghost of her cool lips against her own heat. From the ceiling, visible above the roof of leaves, hang dozens of vines, lightly swaying in a breeze. Focusing on them doesn’t help to calm her down, doesn’t distract her from Louis’ mouth getting more and more persistent, she looks down again, watches as Louis’ fingers travel up her thigh, inching closer. Two of her fingers glide along Harry’s slit, spreading her open, exposing her, and then Louis licks deep inside.

“Fuck,” she says again, this time tensing up hard.

“You want me to slow down?”

Harry laughs incredulously: “Fuck, no, please don’t.”

“It’s just,” she presses a soft kiss to her clit again, looking up through her lashes. “You seem a bit… overwhelmed.”

A blossom falls from her head onto Harry’s pelvis, white petals stark against the red of the lace, the curls of her dark pubes, the thin stretchmarks across her tummy. Before Louis can swipe it up, she picks it up herself, stroking it between thumb and forefinger just as Louis is caressing her clit right now, gently, gradually. “I just. Uhm, Oh God, I can’t believe – fuck, we’re actually doing this.”

Louis moves back and together they get rid of the panties, her knee shortly bumping into her tit, a touch so fleeting and yet making her toes curl with the thought of getting to play with her nipples at some point, to taste them, to kiss them. Then Harry’s mind whites out for a second, as Louis grips her thighs, moving them up on her shoulder, now pressing them against her ears. “Well, Babes, I wanted to do this for -,” she swallows, must swallow Harry’s slick, must taste her on the back of her throat. “I’m gonna make you remember this,” she finishes softly, and then she dives back in, a finger driving into her and her tongue swirling deliciously.

The blossom in her hands is crushed to pieces as she’s trembling and writhing on the carpet, getting smudged with soil and both of their sweat, getting louder by the minute. Her moans echo back from the stone walls, getting lost in the garden, between the leaves, her vision blurring every now and then. Louis’ mouth is warm and persistent, a second finger, then a third rubbing all the right spots inside her, and heat is streaming into Harry’s abdomen fast, pulsing, throbbing until her orgasm builds up, up, up and she claws her nails into the carpet, into her own scalp, bites on her lips. “Gonna come,” she gasps, now trembling so hard Louis has to hold her down.

Louis hums, then speeds up her movements, crooking her fingers just so, sucking on Harry’s clit, and Harry comes, shaking so hard her thighs slip from Louis’ shoulders, her fingers slip along her own sweaty forehead. She doesn’t have a moment to process any of her emotions before their mouths are clashing against each other, and a whole surge of new sensations rushes through her at the taste of her own slick and Louis’ spit. She puts her hands on the back of Louis’ head, clamps her legs around her hip and flips them, shivers at Louis’ barely audible whine. 

“Oh my fuck,” she gasps, tipping her head back, petals getting stuck in the fibres of the carpet, a few flowers immediately bending towards her.

Harry’s stares at the curve of her throat. The fleeting wish to bury her face in it pops up in her mind, fangs extending, then she clenches her jaw, breathing out forcefully. She promised herself to stay in control of her desires. Her gaze travels down Louis’ chest, gets stuck on the way her breasts fall softly to the side, skin less toned where fabric has hidden it.

“Babe,” she mumbles, grinding down, “let me get you off, yeah? How d’you want me to do it?”

“Eat me out? Please,” comes the demand and she nods in inevitable answer, gently licking at the sweat collecting between Louis’ clavicles.

Harry bends her spine, moves her lips along the small rise of Louis’ tits, presses her face into them, fingers squeezing and stroking, thumbing her nipples, flicking her tongue over them. She looks up when her hair is pulled harshly, barely a second of them watching each other with hazy eyes before Louis whispers a quiet “You can do it harder,” and presses Harry’s face against her chest. 

Despite wanting to she doesn’t bite, but carefully grazes her skin with her teeth and it has Louis arching her back and muffling a moan with the side of her fist. Harry, however, doesn’t muffle her sounds as she draws it into her mouth, toying with it with the tip of her tongue. Her fingers circle around Louis’ other breast, only teasing until she pinches, draws her nails over the heated skin. It evokes a quiet sob. “Please, Harry, c’mon, need you to lick me out, okay? Want your mouth on me now.”

A smart reply is forming in her mind, when Louis’ knuckles bump against her sides, sound of a zipper distracting enough for her to lift her head again. There is a triangle of light hitting Louis’ cheek, cheeks flushed and rosy, a lovely contrast to her glinting eyes, the wild looks in them. All retorts make place for the desire to turn them glossy, unfocused, blissful.

Harry sits up, helps to tug Louis’ sweats down, cotton boxers going with them, landing somewhere behind her, hopefully not crushing any plants. A thrumming in her veins masks the sensation of carpet against her stomach when she lies down, it is as if the flowers around them have grown and formed a cushion underneath them. She stares, spit gathering in her mouth, and sweat pooling at the back of her neck, taking in the sight that is presented to her. Between her thighs, slick has turned the colour of Louis’ pubes several shades darker, makes them curl against her skin. “Gonna eat you out,” she mumbles, mainly to keep herself grounded, stopping herself from floating away.

She starts by licking up from Louis’ knee to the middle of her thigh, suppressing all urges to draw blood, peppering light kisses instead. She spends so much time caressing down Louis’ pelvis, her inner thighs, just teasing her; minutes are replaced by the avid sounds Louis makes, needy gasps, high moans. When her mouth meets Louis’ swollen folds, tastes Louis’ slick for the first time and sweetness swathes her senses, she almost starts to cry, seems to be doing that a lot these days. She's so wet, so eager, squirming and bucking her hips against Harry’s face.

“Please,” Louis asks, now pushing at Harry’s head. “C’mon.”

She knows what she is asking for, but Harry won’t give it to her, not yet, instead she drags one finger over her slit smiling at the hitch in her breath. “I’ve missed you.”

They laugh and the huff of air against Louis’ skin makes both of them squirm, makes them shiver. A fluttering breeze comes through the windows, hugging their sweaty bodies, carrying the scent of slick, bitter and salty and sweet.

Louis blinks, pupils turning fuzzy. “I missed you, too.”

Harry kisses her swollen clit, open mouthed and wet, sucking on it.  
For the next minutes she’s content in playing with it in various ways, enjoying the reactions, the whimpers, the squirming, the slick dripping down into the carpet, staining it. It feels like she’s made to do this, to lie in here, plants tickling her calves, pink blossoms tumbling down on them, covering them the more Louis gasps out, starts begging her to fuck her harder. When she’s decided it’s been long enough, she watches closely as she pushes in slowly, reddened hole stretching for her knuckles, she notices the bending of Louis’ spine, the stutter in her breaths, the sudden burst of saplings growing all around them. They expand, mirroring the way Louis loosens around her, getting wetter and wetter, getting hotter and hotter.

Harry swallows, groaning, bending to get more of that bitter sweet taste, licking alongside her fingers. It’s when her neck begins to strain from the angle, when her shoulder blades start to ache that she can feel another surge of slick, heat building up. “Want you to come,” she automatically says, looking up. She plans on the both of them coming many more times before they get dressed, plans on imprinting this day into her memory as strongly as she can, cherishing how far they’ve come.

Not a couple of weeks ago and she was trying to understand the longing within her, trying to make sense of the way she was still hurting, and now everything seems to be falling into place, everything replaced by swelling warmth. But Louis won’t look at her, has one arm thrown across her face, the other trembling as her fingers tighten in Harry’s hair, whole body shaking. Her heart is racing unbelievably now, perceptible in every thundering beat, and Harry needs her to look at her, needs to see the expression in her eyes. “Sweetheart,” she murmurs.

Louis whines, mumbles something that might be a swear, might be a yes, might not be a word at all.

“Never wanna stop touching you,” she crooks her fingers, massages them up at the clenching around her. “Love seeing you like this.”

At that, Louis moves her arm, opens her eyes, a bead of sweat rolling down her temple into her messy hair, cupids bow glistening in the light dancing across her face. Harry doubles her efforts, and it’s not long before Louis’ fingers trace along her cheekbones, before Louis whispers her name, before Louis comes.

She doesn’t stop until she’s come a second time and then cuddles up to her, kisses exchanging their wetness, their hands flying over sweaty skin, and soon they’re back at licking each other again, limbs trembling, breaths hectic. The air around them has become heady and damp, covering them like the petals of the pink tree. When they finally fall into an exhausted sleep, curled up into each other, the saplings around them have turned into flowers, violets blooming in the sun.

 

 

-*-

 

 

It’s weeks of sweat that follow. The sun is relentless, burning down on the city with vigour, drying up gardens and the stripes of grass along the streets, pink sunsets glorifying the sight of motionless cranes, yellowed tree tops and grey skyscrapers. The backs of their dresses stick to their spines, and the backs of their knees itch when they walk, and the backs of their necks heat up from the light and from their teasing touches, and the sheets in her flat are washed so often now, a wet blanket almost always hangs in the living room to dry. Other people will avoid contact at all costs, while they hole themselves up in their homes to interlock their legs and press hands against ribcages and slide skin against skin.

“Come here,” Louis will say and spread her thighs, carpet stained with soil and patches where they have lain, smell of their slick seeping into the fibres, just like the scent of the plants has seeped into Harry’s curls, lulling her to sleep even when she’s alone.

When they’ve calmed their breathing and wiped off the sweat, the slick, the stains of tears, they lie next to each other, aligned from shoulders to ankles, sometimes a cheek pressed to collarbones or an arm to the softness of their tummies. “Do you remember…”, one of them will start, tugging at the other’s happy trail, or tracing a constellation of moles, or following the lightning of stretch marks, and they will colour in their memories of the past. She will avert her gaze from the curve of Louis’ neck, never daring to touch or to kiss her there, and ask her about the bees instead, or the collection of poetry hidden by honeysuckles, or the growing peaches outside the tower, blossoms as pink as the ones above their heads.

It is as if everything and everyone around them has stopped moving, has halted in their daily routine, has poured out into the parks and public squares to watch them as they conquer the world.

But there are weeds in Harry’s paradise.

A persistent one being Louis’ unwillingness to settle into a job. She has had a couple of introduction days but would then come home and tell Harry about minor details that had bothered her, would complain about snippy colleagues and complicated devices, and Harry is really trying to be patient, to fight of the urge to find the true reason for Louis’ refusal to settle in herself. But it makes her clingy, the worry of Louis one day declaring she’ll take off again. It makes her draw her into her arms at any given moment, makes her kiss her urgently against walls and doors and elevators, makes her chest flare in pain when Louis gently pushes her away in public, jokes about being too couple-y.

“’m gonna pay” is what she mumbles, one late evening in a Turkish restaurant, bending down to retrieve her wallet from her backpack, digging through it.

Louis flips her nails against her forearm, and shakes her head, crooked smile growing in her blushed cheeks. It’s warm and crowded, and the air-conditioning seems to be broken, or the candles on the white tablecloth simply emit too much heat. “Don’t, I can pay for myself. We have plenty in our savings.”

Actually, Harry knows that the deposit-account Louis and her sister had opened decades ago, when she and a few of them would transfer sums of their monthly salary, has been straining. They get subsidised by the state like all Nymphs, but that was never much in the first place and Louis’ move into the city, the rent for the turret can’t be cheap. So she strokes one strand of hair behind Louis’ ear, a petal falling into her collar, and rolls her eyes. “Let me pay for this dinner, fuck, it’s not much.”

“You’re behaving like my girlfriend,” is what Louis replies, and her heart stumbles, and Harry’s breath stumbles against the lump in her throat, and her fingertips stumble against Louis’ close fist, reluctant to hold her hand.

“’m not,” she says, swallowing her dizziness. “Sorry.”

“Just…,” but their conversation breaks off, silent until the waitress approaches them and then they split the bill, and they part in front of the restaurant, only hugging a short good-bye. They will happen regularly, these moments where all the lustful enchantment between them seems to be sucked into a hole in the ground, falling into it from one second to the other, and they withdraw from each other, embarrassed.

They’ve stopped whispering _I Love You_ ’s, too, and it probably makes sense, it does, because it might be mistaken for a romantic one, but Harry longs to see Louis’ lips wrap around the words, to experience the comfort they bring. In one hour they would be clawing at each other in private, mouths hungry and passionate, and in the next Louis would be getting deflective about something trivial in public, an endearment that escapes Harry while they’re waiting for the bus, or an attempt to loop an arm around her waist whilst Niall is turning away to read the sign of a bookshop. 

But it’s nothing, the jab in her chest is no pain compared to what she’s experienced before, the years she has waited in inert longing. And it’s nothing compared to the rush of excitement and devotion when Louis wakes up first in the mornings, brews tea while Harry awakes, leaning against the white tree and quietly watching her in her element. It’s nothing, not when they kiss like they do. It’s nothing when she comes back from a day of tedious work and finds Louis with a bouquet of pink and white carnations and Harry will let them in, be pressed against the letterbox and mumble “I’ll never forget you either” and their lips meet, stench of detergent chased away by the scent of flowers, of honey, and affection.

 

 

-*-

 

 

The zipper of the velvet cushion is digging into her calf, but Louis is kneeling between her thighs so she doesn’t dare move and kick it away. It’d be too much of a fuss anyway, she’s very much content with sinking more and more into the sofa, head tipped back and at the mercy of Louis’ mouth. If her wrist wouldn’t ache from fucking Louis just a minute ago, she’d bury them in Louis’ hair, pull her closer.

“Please,” she gasps out.  
Louis hums, tongue still swirling around her clit but her fingers move faster now, hitting all the right spots. Harry can feel her sixth orgasm of the day building up steadily, skin heated, vision going hazy. Her back arches once it finally hits her, pleasure rolling in deep waves up her body, hands clawing into the sofa.

“Fuck,” she says, watching Louis through half lidded eyes, her fingers slowly pulling out and leaving her empty and throbbing faintly.  “C’mere.”

Louis’ mouth is bruised red and tastes like Harry’s slick, sending another shiver down her front, and making her feel like she could go days just sitting here, sweet girl on her lap. They kiss leisurely, until one of them sighs, or slackens, or stretches slightly. Then Louis pulls back, ghosts her lips along Harry’s cheeks, her jaw, her ear. “Do love bites last on you?”

And, see, Harry has always had a strong reaction to that concept. Not just because, no, they don’t last, but mostly because that word combination momentarily sends her spiralling. When she calms down her breathing, Louis has sat up straight and one brow raised. “Okay, what was that? Did you just have a mini-orgasm?”

“No, uhm,” she splutters, wrapping her hands around her waist to stop her from moving away any further. “Is’ just… love bites.” She flashes her fangs.

They laugh, tired from a day of wandering around the city, and sex delirious. The giddiness must be the reason why Louis slowly brings up her fingers, and Harry merely stares in anticipation, wills herself not to close her eyes when Louis traces the shape of one of her fangs. Another stubborn throbbing starts up in her pelvis, a throbbing that intensifies when Louis says: “I’ve always wanted to touch them.”

Harry feels like she’s floating. Only thing anchoring her down is Louis’ weight on her lap, both of their naked thighs sweaty and sticking together. She should pull her away, now, now that at least some part in her brain is shrilling in alarm. This is dangerous, she knows, she can’t anticipate the reaction to -.  
But Louis has already done it. And a tiny, unremarkable drop of blood slides down from where her finger and Harry’s fang meet, onto Harry’s tongue. Her mouth falls shut, trapping Louis. But she doesn’t suck, frankly, doesn’t move at all, solely mirrors Louis’ wide eyes.

“Oh,” Louis breathes. Then she easily withdraws her finger, holding it up and inspecting it like she has never seen it before. And she doesn’t seem to realise, but Harry’s last three decades of self-perception have just been toppled upside down.

This is not what she knows about herself. This is not the reaction she had feared for in her good, longed for in her bad, and expected in her balanced moments. This is not, despite therapy, despite her build-up discipline, what she thought would happen if she ever got to taste fresh blood again, especially not what she was convinced would happen if she ever got to taste _Louis’_ blood. Truly, her body feels strung all of a sudden, muscles tense, but that is because she wills them to, because she is able to lock away the thrumming urge to reel Louis in and sink her fangs into her skin. She is still floating slightly, however, that has less to do with the high of blood and more to do with the most beautiful person of her life sitting in her lap and trusting her completely. “Holy fuck.”

Again, they laugh. “Was it that good?” Louis teases. Then pops her finger into her own mouth.

Harry finally squeezes her eyes shut and lets out a huff. “Fucking hell. Do you even know…”

“How wonderful I taste?”

“Shut up,” she pinches her hip. “You do.”

Louis’ grin is everything. “Best tasting pal you ever had?”

“Shut up,” she repeats, intently now. “I can’t believe... you just fucking did that. You didn’t even know how I would react.” The words brake a barrier in her, and suddenly she’s truly distressed.

Louis’ grin disappears faster than it emerged, hints of shame replacing it in the O of her mouth and the stutter of her lashes. It only helps a bit in lessening the strain in Harry’s jaw, in smoothing her furrowed brows. “I’m sorry. Fuck, I didn’t – think -… that’s no excuse. I’m sorry, I should’ve asked if you’re okay with it, I – I won’t do it-”

“I’m not worried about myself, fuck. I could’ve hurt you!”

“Right,” she shifts on Harry’s thighs, warm skin against warm skin, smooth hairs against smooth hairs, and she wants her gone, she wants her far away from her. “Oh, fuck. But you don’t -… you’re not losing control, are you? That’s in the past?”

Louis doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what exactly happened, she thinks it is a simple, everyday vampire thing. She doesn’t know that Harry spent the nineties waiting for anyone who was consenting to offer her their blood, basically living in the bars designed for meet-ups, basically living from one bite to the other. Breathing in deeply, she reaches for Louis’ hands. “You should not trust me like that.”

“But I do, Harry,” softly, softly, “I trust you with every cell in my body.”

Harry’s stomach lurches. “You can’t fucking say that!”

“Why are you so fucking upset about this?” Louis spits out and she’s getting angry now, too.

But Harry can’t possibly tell her, can’t possibly admit to the crusade of emotions she is currently experiencing, has been experiencing since Louis is back. Can’t tell her that her opinion matters the most, that it was the act of her leaving that made Harry’s values twist into something small and mean, into a self-loathing whisper to go out and get swathed by the taste of blood. Not when they just started to rekindle their friendship. Not when she herself doesn’t even know what she is feeling. Not when Louis needs distance, a casual hook-up, not when she could be gone in a few months. “We’re so fucking lucky that I didn’t just lose it, I haven’t tasted fresh blood in years, Louis, you know that! I could’ve fucking hurt you. And I, I promised myself that I would never drink anything but synthesised blood again, I promised-”

Louis, whose shoulders had tensed more and more while Harry was talking, is now moving to get off her lap, expression hard. “I don’t fucking know what you promised yourself, Harry, I don’t know what you’ve been thinking for the past thirty years. How would I know that you promised yourself never to drink blood again, when the last state I remember you in is you basically drowning in it every night? When you’d constantly get pissed, constantly tossing me aside for some random asshole.”

The constant humming of the city falls through the windows, the room is filled with the noise of cars and people chatting and a child yelling, and the two of them breathing, and Louis’ thumping heart, and the sound of Harry’s guilt. It feels like it seeps out of her, an ugly, heavy sludge that clogs her throat, her pores, her lungs. Louis is merely the outstretch of an arm’s length away from her, sitting at the other end of the sofa, but the space between them creaks and groans. She forces a shaky exhale through the mud in her chest.

“It was worse after -. In the nineties,” she says. “So many people had died before,” she says. “Of AIDS, and violence, and-… just age. I missed Vivien. I missed all the people in Paris,” she says. Doesn’t say that she missed Louis. “And I spiralled, instead of seeking help I tried to numb it with -. Yeah.”

She can see the trembling of Louis’ lips, can see the sheen in her eyes diminishing, glistening, diminishing again. “You weren’t the only one who was hurt.”

“I know,” she sniffs, tears now rolling down her cheeks. “I know. And I’m so, so sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, and I’m sorry I kept pushing you away. I took you for granted and I thought nothing could ever happen to us again, not after we survived the wars, and we found our communities and -. I’m so fucking sorry.” It feels like the words are ripped out of her chest, an iron hand reaching down her throat, through the sludge, and forcing them out into the open from the pits of her soul, presenting them to the world. They have been milling around in her core for so long, have only ever been exposed in disguise, and hidden behind touches, actions, other truths. It feels like something is missing in her. Her insides don’t know what to do with the sudden space, with the sudden burden lifted off of them. She clutches her hand to her stomach, wills herself to calm down.

Through blurry vision, she can see Louis nodding to herself, a small and cautious movement. “Thank you,” she undeniably hears, and the empty spaces are filled with a pressure of gratitude, the weight of relief.

She doesn’t need Louis to forgive her, she only needs her to know that she is truly and earnestly sorry. “I promise,” she repeats herself. “I promise, I will be there for you whenever you need me. I could never take you for granted, uhm, again, I could never -. I promise, whenever you need me, I’ll try everything I can.”

After that, Louis huffs out a small, wet laugh. “You can’t promise that. And I don’t want you to.”

“ _I_ want to.”

“Harry, can you -,” Louis sighs, smile tugging at the left corner of her mouth. “You’re being dramatic again – it’s alright, it’s your way. But. I think I just needed to hear your apology. I mean, I can’t promise I won’t be…”

“You’re allowed to be upset-“

“I know that, Babe. Fuck, I was so hurt back then.” Harry wills herself not to spiral into that sentence, to accept it, to acknowledge it calmly. “And that was… well, I guess you know that was the reason I left.”

She bows her head. “Yeah.”

“But, honestly, what friends don’t go through stuff like that. Remember when we wouldn’t talk to Dolly for years because of that stunt she pulled? Anyway, what I’m getting at is – we needed that, Harry. We needed the space. And you need to stop beating yourself up, I didn’t know-... if you’d have told me, back then, how you were dealing, do you think I wouldn’t’ve come back? Do you think I wouldn’t’ve been there for you? I’m so fucking sorry you had to go through that alone. I’m sorry I left without giving us - you a chance.”

Harry takes in her fond expression, her honest eyes, her blushing cheeks, her naked body now cooling off, nipples hardening. “You’re right,” she says. “You’re right. We needed time. And… and, uhm, I think I also needed to go through that alone – I needed to realise how bad I was feeling on my own. I needed to go and seek help. And besides,” she smiles, “you’re back now. We have that chance to make this right.”

“Fuck, let me hug you, yeah? Fuck.”

Instead of asking whether Louis is sure, whether they should take a shower first or let the both of them have a break from all this emotional onslaught, she sniffles and pulls her in, one arm tightening around her middle and her head resting on her clavicles. “I love you,” she says. “There’s no one in the world whose friendship means as much to me as yours.”

“Alright,” reaches her ears over the stumbling of Louis’ heart. “I love you, too.”

She closes her eyes, sinks into the feeling of Louis on top of her, of Louis’ hands carding through her curls, of their naked bodies aligned. It smells of sweat and slick and heat and Louis’ floral scent, and it washes away the stubborn remains of all the anger, all the fear, all the guilt. But there’s the smell of Louis’ blood, too, the pulsing of it behind the skin Harry’s nose is pressed into. “I can’t believe I tasted your blood,” blurts out of her, taste of it still faint on her tongue.

Louis snorts, thighs tightening around her. “That was so fucking stupid of me, sorry. Was it… was it hard to, like, control yourself?”

Harry tips her chin up, spine relaxing against the backrest of the sofa. Slowly, she shakes her head. “Not at all.”

“That’s good,” Louis says, twirling one of her curls. “Does that mean you…”

“What?”

“Does that mean you’d wanna, like... you know…”

Harry swallows. “It can be so intimate.”  
And with Louis it would be, no doubt. She doesn’t know if she’s ready for it, doesn’t want to risk it when any strong emotion could possibly kick her back into that hole of senselessness. The way she feels when they’re having sex, the way she feels when she’s merely looking at her, she doesn’t know if she could pull back from Louis’ blood.

“So you don’t... you don’t want that with me?”

“Fuck,” Harry pants. “It’s not about that, it’s – you know. That I dunno if I could just drink your blood without needing to, like. Do more.”

The only heart beating in the room starts racing. “I…,” Louis begins, not looking up. “I kinda like that idea. Not, not in a-… I don’t want to get hurt, obviously, but I… I do like the idea of you, like, holding me down.”

Harry’s gonna die again. Drop dead, and this time it’ll be for good. “Really?”

A pause. “Really.” Another pause. “Fuck, I just can’t stop thinking about it, how it’d feel, I know it’s supposed to be really, like, pleasurable.”

“It’s, uhm, yeah, it evokes a, like, bliss,” it comes out raspy and deep, and it must be a startling comparison to the way her limbs are trembling, the way her eyes feel glossy from staring too intensely. This exact loss of her capacities shakes her out of her haze. She brings up one hand to press it to Louis’ cheek. “I’d love to do that for you. I really, really do, but I don’t trust myself not to hurt you. This tiny drop of blood is nothing, I could still lose it if I’d actually bite you.”

Louis’ gaze cuts through her. “Okay. Okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I understand,” she smiles, blue shimmering in the sun. “I’d never want you to do something you’re not sure about.”

Harry traces her lips with her thumb, then smirks. “I can still hold you down, if you wanna.”

 

 

-*-

 

 

She’s strolling through an art exhibition by the local University, with Liam by her side excitedly telling her about the pieces. From all sides, huge eyes blink at them. It’s a multimedia installation, and the main part is four videos playing from the walls, and all that happens is a slow blink of lashes every five seconds.

“So, you think you’d go crazy and kill her? Rip out her throat in a manner of nasty white men movies?”

“No, fuck,” Harry hisses. “What vampire has actually killed someone in the last decades? I mean, by drinking their blood. But I could hurt her, you know that. What if I fall into some kind of stupor and I take too much? I don’t even fucking know the nearest hospital.”

Their lashes are coated in vibrant colours, some are adorned with feathers. “C’mon you’d have to take a lot for that to happen. You drink, what, a litre of blood every week? You’d feel full after ten minutes of sucking her blood. Especially after that synthesised shit you willingly take.”

 “I know, I know. But what if I don’t close the wound, or, fuck, what if I start, like, thinking that drinking blood is better than actually living, again?”

“Didn’t you try drinking blood once you finished your therapy?” They ask, waving to a student who hurries past them.

“Yeah, yeah I did, it was part of it, actually. And, uhm, technically I know that it isn’t the blood per se, but like, my emotional state, and I know that I’m emotionally happy and healthy, but – but what if I’m wrong?”

Liam grabs her by the shoulders: “You know what I think? I think you’re thinking of yourself as someone who doesn’t exist anymore. You’ve changed. You’ve grown.”

The huge eyes on the walls blink and so does Harry. “That’s… yeah. I guess. It’s just really hard to know if I truly can’t trust myself or if it’s simply me _thinking_ I can’t trust myself.” A group of people spills into the room, chattering enthusiastically. Some of them throw interpretations around as soon as they take in the art work, some of them inspect the plaque by the door, and some of them pull out their phones. Their noise adds to the sudden chaos in Harry’s head. “I didn’t even feel the urge to, like, attack her. Just wanted to nick her a bit, make her feel good.”

“See. It’s as if you’re seeing yourself like some human would. Looking at yourself through the eyes of your oppressor, that’s what you’re doing.”

Dangerous and lethal and irrational, greedy for physical and mental power, for control. She lets out a dry laugh, shakes her head. “And I protested in the fifties, can you imagine? It’s like I learned nothing from those fights, the fights for our rights.”

“Sorry to tell you, Sunshine, but the fight never stopped.” 

The huge eyes blink in affirmation.

 

 

-*-

 

 

It’s late on a Monday night, when Niall’s call comes.

“I need you to help me.” Her voice is even and composed and her sentences short and precise. “I’m this close from a panic attack.” In the background loud voices and beeping and tiny wheels rushing over tiles mash together. “Please.”

One and a half hours later, Harry is in the hospital, standing by Zayn’s bed and staring at the tube leading into her small wrist. She has always been quite pale, but now her dark lashes, her bushy brows, the contour of her lips stand stark against her ashen skin. Her usually well styled hair falls onto the cushion in messy strands, head small in the white bed, body so very fragile pierced by all those needles. Blood and something translucent seep into her, drops against plastic bags louder than her slow breathing.

Niall has snot and tears all over her face, red blotches trailing down from her neck into the collar of her open button-up. It’s crinkled and a button seems to be missing and there’s blood clinging to the seam of one of the sleeves. There are no words Harry can come up with, nothing of consolation, nothing but: “I’m sorry you have to go through this, I’m so fucking sorry.”

She drags her to her chest, into her arms and it’s the first time she feels like the taller one in their relationship, the first time she feels like she needs to be the one in control. It feels wrong and it feels sickening, especially when she looks over Niall’s shoulder at Zayn’s closed eyes. Allergy, is what they’ve been told for years, an intolerance verging onto anaphylaxis is what they’ve now found out. Because Niall had to wake up to Zayn wheezing beside her. “It’s gonna be alright,” she says because that is the truth, is what the doctors have said, but it still seems useless to state, useless to promise.

Harry can do nothing but tighten her hold, can do nothing but gently sway them back and forth, drawing circles into Niall’s back. She can do nothing, and she wasn’t able to do anything prior. Not in the past months when Zayn’s condition worsened, not in the past years when all she did was drift through the world like a fallen leaf in water, not in the decade she spent sitting next to similar beds and similar sights of friends hooked onto monitors. It’s all a cycle of being swept away by lurid, lying laughter and inevitably sticking to the fibres of the harsh truth: Life slips away from her, escapes her smiling lips, seeps from her slack palms because life has never belonged to her.

The weight of death clings to her fingers, sucking all energy out of her body. First it’s her hands that feel numb, then her arms, then her shoulders, then the dip of her neck. With every passing minute that Niall’s sobbing doesn’t stop, the rhythm of the liquids keeps its dreadful pace, the muffled rush from the hall crawling through the door, cold spreads in her chest. Not one centimetre of her body is connected to her brain, not one muscle moves more than on autopilot.

The lights cast an eerie gloom, draining the few vibrant pigments in the room. An orange bin looks like the nauseating colour of vomit. Heavy clouds from a dissolving storm fall as the curtains by the windows. Only the red and green alarms on the machines blink firmly. Then a nurse comes in, checking the screens, the bags, Zayn’s lungs, speaking to Niall in a calm, comforting tone. Harry watches them from the wall, feet heavy in her boots, hands buried in the cardigan she had thrown over last minute.

When she gets home, she has her body back. But her mind is still unreachable, still a mist outside her head. So she changes, sweaty pyjamas exchanged for something dark and tight and guarding, and she grabs her wallet and keys, one last check in the mirror, emotionless eyes staring back at her, and then she leaves.

 

 

-*-

 

 

A wooden barrier marks the way downstairs. Lights in purple and red wash over it, over the thick carpet covering the steps, the gleaming adornments in golden swirls and floral patterns. The walls are covered in carpets, too, velvet rugs against dark panels, shimmering satin keeping out the world behind the windows. Even a chandelier throws prisms across the bottles behind the bar, the portraits above the tables, the faint scratches on all surfaces.

Harry turns her back towards the staircase and asks for another non-alcoholic cocktail.

She’s not usually one to stand in a bar, prefers to sit in a corner or dance in the middle of the floor, but it’s way after midnight and there are barely any people drifting about. There’s a couple just by the entrance almost dry-humping by the looks of it, and a few old souls have their shoulders hunched over the counter at the other end of the spacious room. Two of them wear late 17th century attire that most likely isn’t costumes and have probably been washed one time in the last decade. Her eyes are glued to their high collars, white lace shadowed in the darkness.  
  
Muffled groans are heard, drifting up through the cracks in the floor.

With flared nostrils she takes a sip, holding the taste of raspberries and cranberry on her tongue before swallowing, desperately trying to avoid thinking about the blood that is most likely sloshing over wine glasses, dripping down necklines, smearing across lips just below her feet. She should not have come. 

Harry pulls out her phone, scrolling through social media in one hand and holding up her glass with the other, willing herself to focus on unimportant posts by unimportant people. And Niall. Who has send her message, blue notification lighting up. But instead of reading it, she pulls up the camera roll and stares at the photographs she took days ago.

In some of them, Louis is aware of the lens, making silly faces, forming kissy lips, even smiling genuinely. But there are over twenty of her simply laying in the grass, eyes closes and basking in the sun, light falling onto the rise of her cheekbones, the petals in her hair, the rosy blush in her lips. The slope of her neck. Harry coughs slightly, then enlarges one of the photographs. Louis’ expression in it is not exactly flattering, she must’ve sneezed in that moment or started to talk, but it strains the skin from her clavicles up to her chin. She has never kissed that space. Has never licked it or sucked on it.

Sudden anger surges through her and she forces the device into the pocket of her leather pants, downing the drink. The bartender who had taken her signature of consent as soon as she came in, smiles as she tips him generously, but she doesn’t mirror it, admits defeat and walks towards the wooden barrier. The door at the end of the stairs is closed, but through the keyhole a shift in lighting is visible. It’s less multi-coloured, a hazy golden sheen making the dust particles floating around the staircase glow in their dance.

The music is different, too. Once she’s opened the door, soft classical tones tinkle through the air. An actual piano thrones on a platform, a figure in a suit is bent over it, hair falling into their face. The room is a perfect circle, decidedly vaster than the one above, and several of the same chandelier host hundreds of electrical candles illuminating the arcs in the walls, the stucco among the ceiling, the thin satin draperies. Most people are slow dancing, dressed in glitter and fur, casual jeans and shirt, or a getup from previous centuries. Bolstered sofas and armchairs are occupied by entangled couples, cuddling and kissing; or attentive singles, roaming the room with intense stares. Everyone with a heartbeat has their eyes closed in ecstasy while everyone without one looks like they are trapped in a trance.

“You haven’t been here in ages,” comes a giggle from Harry’s right, and she recognised the flirtatious tone before recognising the facial features of the vampire now clutching her arm.

“You’ve changed your hair.”

“And you haven’t changed at all. Now, give me a kiss and we’ll find you someone who wants you to suck them, yes?”

There is blood all around them. Carbonated in tastefully arranged champagne flutes, mixed with wine, in tiny bowls next to trays full of fruit, pouring down fountains like chocolate. And trickling from punctures into necklines, along slack wrists and into open palms, and from the corners of reddened mouths that smile in satisfaction. There’s a buffet full of food, too, lots of sugar and protein. Someone sips tea, pinky extended, while someone else kneels by their feet, biting them in the forearm and eyes closed in gratification.

“Don’t call it that,” she says weakly, letting herself be pulled towards one of the sofas. “I don’t even know if I’m up for it tonight.”

The pearly laughter is still the same, fangs just as bleachy white as the rest of those straight teeth. “You’ve been gagging for it since you came through the door.”

Her throat throbs in agreement, but then her gaze locks with one of a vampire’s by the buffet. Their posture is loose, hands buried in dress pants, but strong torso hidden behind an every-day shirt, collar slightly damp. In their expression lies a cool smile, clean lips twisting. But not a single emotion brightens their eyes, no joy, no sadness, no comfort just passive ease. At that, something cold sloshes down her body, from head to toe, makes her freeze. Because, no. She has been, well, gagging for it for much longer. But this is not what she wants. She doesn’t want to bite the person who is making their way towards them, or the figure by an armchair eyeing her coquettishly, or the human couple waving at her. She doesn’t want them.

“I’m awfully sorry,” she says with a growing smile. “We have to see each other another time, but I just realised that I don’t actually wanna be here.”

Confusion and maybe incomprehension flits across the face of her companion. “What… Are you sure? Lilly and Aimée back there have been waiting for a women loving woman all night.”

She makes an apologetically gesture towards the couple, then breathes out and makes a small curtsey. “I don’t think I’ll be back soon. But I might look around during daytime and we can catch up, yeah?”

And Harry turns her back towards the person who has now reached them, shuts out the tinkling of the piano, walks out of the room and up the stairs, golden light split by her body, her steps dull and final all at once, grin straining her cheeks, her cheeks that are getting wet because she’s crying, she’s crying, she’s crying from pride. 

 

 

-*-

 

An hour later she wanders by the church near her flat, originally on the way to her bed and a ground that won’t topple under her feet. But she halts before the wooden entrance, looks up the façade, and the steeple reminds her of another tower, a tower much more impressive than this one. So she heads out of the inner rings of the city, stumbling through the waning night, vision tear-hazy, whole body thrumming with purpose. At first she can’t find the gate to the park, contemplates climbing over the fence until she sees it, silly little gate keeping her from Louis. Louis! Oh, what will she think of her? Will she be proud? 

The turret seems to grow. It reaches towards the dark sky, towards the clouds tinted in a reddish blush of city fumes, towards the stars behind them. Harry stares up at the ivy growing out of the windows and loosens her shoulders. She’s actually doing this, ready to tell Louis that, yes, she wants to drink her blood, knows, now, that she has every inch of her own body back, she has her mind back. Fully, and irrevocably. 

She feels so elevated, so satiated. It’s better than blood, this newfound assurance, this powerful knowledge of having control over her choices. She’s no longer at the mercy of her impulses. The certainty heightens her senses to a degree that is almost too overwhelming, she was used to a muffled version of the world and now everything is more detailed, saturated. And the smells! Walking through the park had nearly knocked her out, so many lush scents and lovely fragrances – now all the more that only wood separates her from the garden in the tower.

Louis opens the door. Harry digs her nails into the frame.

It is almost as if she is seeing her for the first time since she came back. It feels as if until now she had only looked at her and remembered the way she looks, was only able to look at her through a haze of fear and distorted reality. “You,” she breathes out, fingers searching to trace Louis’ lips, finding her cheek. A sob escapes her as she comes in contact with her smooth skin, touching the source of this heavenly, heavenly smell. Greedily she inhales all the flourish, all the warmth Louis emits, encompassing her in a crushing hug, pressing her nose into her hair.

“What? What is-,” Louis asks, but she’s clutching back, delicate fingers digging into Harry’s hips.

“I did it, Lou,” she whispers. “I did it.”

She can feel Louis swallowing, can feel the sudden tension in her back: “What’d you do? Are you hurt?”

Harry simultaneously bursts into tears and into hysterical giggles. It must look incredibly sexy.

“Let’s sit down, yeah, drink some water.” There’s still concern colouring Louis’ voice, a tentativeness as she pulls Harry forwards. But she can concentrate on that because as soon as she’s inside she freezes and slaps a hand to her nose and mouth. “Oh, God.”

The perfumes of hundreds of plants, the blossoms and leaves, even sparse branches ambush her sense, make it hard to breathe, to function. It smells of Louis, so strongly as if she’s buried in her, as if all there is has been a part of Louis. And it has, she realises, half marvelling half shocked, everything in here has been touched by Louis, has been formed by her. Everything. “You wonderful, wonderful person,” she gushes, clutching Louis’ arm. But it goes uncommented, door falling shut behind them.

It’s only the muted moonlight through the window that’s contouring the silhouettes of the plants now, white tree tinted blue in the darkness, the pink blossoms a dark purple, the violets on the floor almost black. Another rush of tears falls down her face.

“Harry, what happened?” Louis is asking, hands all over Harry’s torso, and oh, her touch feels so good, so warm, so familiar. “Are you sure you aren’t hurt? Is -” a pause. “Is someone else hurt?”

It calms her down, that question. She needs to get herself together or otherwise she’ll just make it seem like she did the opposite of what she achieved today, got high on blood. Exhaling and wiping away the wetness on her cheeks, she turns towards Louis. An anxious strain sits beside her eyes, lips between her teeth. Before Harry takes her hands she has to push away the need to kiss her. “I was at a club, just now.” The strain deepens. “Because – well, something happened. With Zayn.” The strain is replaced by fearful worry. “She’s okay, she’s okay. She’s in the hospital, but she’s stable and they’re giving her blood, which, that’s ironic, isn’t it? Uhm, well, I was… I was really upset.” Louis visibly braces herself. “And I went to that club, the one I told you about. Where you can meet… yeah. But, Louis. I left. I didn’t do it. I didn’t drink anyone’s blood. I was on the verge of doing so, but. I left. I did it.”

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Louis says. It’s not a shout and it’s not in horror, but it’s also not a whisper or in affection. “Oh, you fucking asshole, you got me thinking you assaulted some person on the street, or, or somehow got high on something, you stupid fucking idiot! What the fuck!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Harry laughs, pulling her into another hug. “I’m just so – so happy, so excited!” 

Louis bites her in the shoulder. It sends a pulsing bolt of heat down her front. “I’m so fucking happy for you, too, but please, tell me what happened I’m still half asleep. You went to that club but also you didn’t? What about Zayn, what happened to her?”

So they sink down, backs against the white tree, hips and legs aligned, the moonlight filtering through the leaves, and Harry sobs some more and recounts everything that happened, beginning with Niall’s call, and they both express sadness and worry and hope for Zayn, and relief and happiness and hope for Harry, and they fall into giddy laughter by the end of it, Louis still dizzy from sleep, Harry still dizzy from her revealed power over her fears.

Not once do their fingers stop dancing with each other, wandering back and forth between their thighs, tracing each other’s skin. She tells the truth about longing for blood in reaction to pain and loss of control, she confesses about reacting like this in answer to some things Louis has done since she is back. “When you wouldn’t answer, uhm, in that first week I really wanted to. And when you told me you wanted me to suck your blood, fuck, then I really, really wanted to.”

“Oh, Babe,” Louis says, kissing her knuckles. “That must’ve been hard to fight.”

“It was,” she mumbles, sinking into the blue of Louis’ eyes, shaded in the dark.

“But you did it. And now you don’t have to fear that urge again, yeah?”

And then she kisses Harry. A soft glide of their lips, nothing more, but it’s a demonstration of affection and care and trust, and it has Harry trembling.

 

 

-*-

 

She is separated from the world by a fog around her senses. Limbs heavy and shaky in their joints, shoulders and elbows tingling against the surface she’s draped over. Something digs in the back of her head and at first she confuses it for a hangover, a hangover from going to that club and losing control. Panic surges through her until she manages to make her hands move and detects it to be her own wallet, keys denting the faux leather. She lets her fingers fall over her eyes, bright geometrical forms dancing in front of them, everything glassy and surreal. Her lips feel sore. Another bolt of panic turns her vision clear and focused.

With a gasp, she remembers. Her lips are swollen not because she had pressed them to a stranger’s neck and sucked their blood, they’re tingling and spit soft because Louis had kissed them. Because last night they took too long to fall asleep, not wanting to stop touching, not wanting to part. Harry is not in some stranger’s bed, she’s lying beneath the white tree in Louis’ tower, the pink petals shaded, it must be just about noon, the sun too high to shine directly through any of the windows. But some of the blossoms still unfurl as she looks at them, showing off their stems.

Louis is next to her. Curled up, cheek resting on one arm, other hand close to her breast, small puffs of air tumbling through her lips. Her fingers are smudged with soil, her knees, too, and a few plants have grown around her torso. Petunias, and purple stock, and behind her orange wallflowers. She looks so beautiful a small tear wells up in Harry’s eye, and she inhales her scent, still muted by her own stifled senses but familiar and captivating. She gasps again. It wakes Louis up, lashes pressing together once before fluttering open. Her gaze wanders around, examining the flora, before coming to rest on Harry, blinking slowly. Then she makes a noise, a sweet, sweet noise full of drowsiness and confusion.

“Why’re you awake?”, she asks, slurred. Harry is silent. Keeps herself from breathing when Louis reaches out a hand and pats her gently on the face, soil now clinging to her nose. “Needa sleep more.”

“Sleep,” she whispers, cupping Louis’ hand and bringing it down to her chest. Louis makes another noise and nods, eyelids sinking close again. 

They stay like that for about an hour, long enough for the sun to creep across the sky and send some beams back inside the tower, long enough for Harry’s senses to come back, long enough for her to re-live every detail of last night in great vividness. Worry about Zayn urges her to look for her pants, to find her phone tucked in the pocket of it. But the need to stay next to Louis is stronger, keeps her tied to the ground, carpet cushioning her back, a few plants tickling her skin. Maybe she’ll stay here forever, let the flowers hide her, become one with them. That sounds like a peaceful life. She looks at Louis and wonders, as ever so often, how it feels to be a part of nature, always. In some situations more than others, in some forms deeper than in others, but always drawing from the earth and always giving back to it. Louis is ever cycling life, and, although Harry has had decades to outgrow that thinking, there had still been parts of her that believed all she is is death and violence. But those parts feel smaller now, diminishing in the knowledge that she isn’t a victim to her fears.

Harry carefully puts Louis’ hand above the space where her heart once was, imagining life growing from it, nudging something within.

Eventually Louis makes another noise, stretches from top to toe, hand falling from Harry’s. This time, she sits up quite instantly, swaying a bit as she ruffles through her hair. “I want tea. You want tea?”

Harry gazes up at her, follows the curve of her spine. Nods.

“’aight,” she says, tipping on all fours and crawling to the stove by the staircase, avoiding the bits in the ground where the most flowers grow. Her shirt rides up and exposes her naked bum, once again manipulating Harry’s breath.  It must be a remnant of last night’s chaos of emotions, but she feels herself getting wet immediately, feels the first impulse to move and reach out.

While she’s waiting for the water to boil, Louis leans against the tower wall, bits of mistletoes growing from the wall falling to her shoulders, vines beginning to wrap around her ankles. It smells like clove and oregano and it sends a memory through Harry, a day in spring when they went hiking somewhere in a nameless forest, taking a break in a grotto by a tinkling river, resting in its shadow. There, too, the plants had reached out to Louis. And Harry had brushed them away, not wanting Louis to have to damage them herself. Now she simply watches.

She silently drinks her tea. Louis has moved to the white tree, naked legs outstretched and contentedly sipping from her cup, oblivious to what she is doing to Harry. Sometime between her third refill and the subsiding of her yawns, she begins to talk about Zayn, softly voicing concern, words so affected, so loving. And it seems to get even more clouded by those emotions when she expresses, for another time, how proud she is of Harry for leaving that club. It is something nonsensical to get aroused by but her glowing smile makes the muscles in Harry’s thighs tense. 

“So. Now that you know you can control your, like, desire to suck blood.” A sizzling orb of heat takes a tour through her body, ends up in the pits of her stomach and expands in there. “D’you still not wanna suck mine?”

Louis takes a sip of tea. Harry exhales through her nose.

“I’m- I. I don’t think so.“

“You don’t think you wanna suck my blood?”

“I don’t think I _don’t_ wanna suck your blood.”

The answering grin is accompanied by a light blush, sending tiny shocks down the back of Harry’s spine. “Yeah?”

“I think, I’m like. Just. To know that I had the strength to leave that club… and, uhm, we can start, like. Small.”

“Oh, Harry,” and her whole skin tingles with the breathiness of that outcry. “You wanna?” The abrupt change overcoming Louis switches up the whole atmosphere in the room. Suddenly, Harry’s so much more conscious of the pleasant fragrances that hang in the air, hundreds of flowers releasing their attractants, hundreds of leaves sighing in a fresh breeze.

Louis sets the cup down, crawls closer. Shadows dance across her cheekbones, spots of light twirling in her eyes. Her lips are a dusty pink, skin so thin Harry’s fangs would nick them easily. “I want to,” she says. Low. Quiet.

Their thighs touch, Louis on her lap, Louis in nothing but a thin shirt on her lap. Louis. “But we can do that another time. Wanna fuck you.”

Laughter splits the air, like a breeze rushing through the tower, rusting the violets, rustling the pink blossoms of the white tree. It pearls into their kisses, lips pausing to smile, tongues tracing their happiness. Warmth, radiating off of Louis, sticks to where Harry’s skin is uncovered, pooling in her abdomen. It reminds her of the life, the blood that is thrumming inside of Louis’ body. It reminds her of the life that is thrumming inside herself.

 

 

 -*-

 

 

It’s boring at lunch now, Niall barely talks, has given up on cheerful chatter. Harry never realised how much Zayn’s presence has provoked the two of them into conversation, how much of their comfort relied on Zayn’s soft hums, her insightful remarks, her body language calming theirs. Their colleagues seem to stare at them even more, or simply more obvious now that the two of them do nothing but sit in silence. She’s awful at small talk, awful at trying to figure out how to comfort her friend.

 

 

-*-

 

 

On the way from the hospital to Harry’s flat, they pass the church.

Even though they could use the one a few hundred meters away, Louis halts at the traffic light in front of the wooden entrance, leans against the pole. Purple circles have formed under her eyes from when she has been sitting at Zayn’s bed, not crying, not sniffing, but voice raspy and faltering. As opposed to Harry’s loss of words, she had found just the right ones, calming Niall after a panic attack, softly bantering with Zayn once she had greeted them hello.

“Look at you being all strong and tough,” she had said, and all four of them had laughed, a little sheepish, a little hesitant, but they had laughed.

Zayn is on a sure road of recovery, now supplied with synthetic blood, not as perfect as one fitted to her DNA, but better than what she had suffered from the past years. The cost is not fully covered, though, which makes a great deal for concern. It will be straining for the two, undoubtedly, because of course they won’t accept neither Louis’ offer to help nor Harry’s. They will have to make some changes in their lifestyle. But that will pass. They have decades, after all.

They have decades, Harry thinks, and watches Louis tap her foot against the kerb. Behind them, the bells of the church chime. She strokes along Louis’ neckline, where her skin is slightly reddened from the summer sun. It will be autumn soon. “D’you remember the last time we were in a church?”

Louis bows her head, allowing Harry’s fingers to wander into her hair. “Of course I do.”

The light turns green but they don’t move, a family of three rushing past them, little child hopping and playing with the skirt of a pretty dress. No one walks towards them. “It was the last time I’ve ever went to a church.”

“For me, too,” is the soft reply. Human ears couldn’t have heard it through the rush of the cars, the chatter of the tourists sitting in the chairs by the restaurants all around them. “Do you miss her, still?”

She turns around, Louis, looking up at her. Her hand slips to her shoulder, thumb under the thin strap of her top. “Sometimes,” she says. “Every day. But it’s quiet. I learned to cope with it, just how I learned to deal with… with the others.”

“You think it’ll get easier?” Louis asks, hand coming up on Harry’s hip.

She steps closer to her, breathes her in, ignoring the fumes and the smell of fries and alcohol and other people’s sweat. “No. No, I don’t think so. But we’ll find more ways to cope.” There’s a patch of cyclamen by the church, and despite them not blooming yet, their scent wafts over to them.

And all of a sudden, the look in Louis’ eyes changes. There is something clearing, something shifting. And then she stretches and presses her mouth to Harry’s lips. It’s short and it’s fleeting and there’s a second of them just breathing in each other, still hands feeling the rise and fall of their ribcages. Then Louis laughs, something high and startled, a giggle she presses into Harry’s neck. “I can’t wait to be right by your side when we discover those ways.”

Something expands in her, something loud and vibrant and powerful.  “ _Louis_ ,” she says. Nearly crushes her in the hold of her arms. “I’ll always be by your side.”

And then Louis bites her in the neck. It’s a nibble, really, but it still smarts a little and they laugh and Harry knows. She knows. “You want to?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

In the strands of her hair, purple petals have tangled, radiant in the sun. They tumble to the ground, spots of colour against the grey of the city, when Harry buries her hands in her hair and hauls her in again, kissing her urgently. They stand there many more minutes before they cross the road, hand in hand. Sweaty palms aligned, knuckles locking into each other. They only part for Harry slotting the key into the hole, stepping back and making a small curtsey: “Mademoiselle.”

“Shut up,” Louis snorts, clutching her hand. While they ascend the stairs, she looks back over her shoulder with every step, pulling Harry along, smiling wide. Her scent is already getting stronger.

Shoes off, hands washed over secretive looks, little nudges, they now stand uselessly in the kitchen. It’s stifling hot, window closed to keep the bugs out. Harry thinks about sitting down, sinks her nails into the backrest of the chair instead.

“So. You want this, right?”

She stares at her. The blush in her skin. The pulsating in her neck. “I – I mean, yeah. Obviously.”

Louis grins, her whole body winding as she leans against the counter. Then, and Harry’s entire life flashes before her eyes, she picks up a knife from the rack, twisting it in her grasp, inspecting it. “I really, really want you to.”

Her knuckles hurt from her grip on the back of the chair, from keeping her hands where they are instead of roaming them along Louis’ sides, up her arms, to rest at her neck. She can see the shy pulse underneath Louis’ even skin. “I trust you.”

“’nd do you trust yourself?”

Harry smiles at the floor. Looks up and nods, bites her lower lip. 

And Louis grins again, pink tongue flashing against the white of her teeth, before she travels the tip of her finger along the blade of the knife and pushes it against the tip of it. Harry can see the way her skin bends before it gives in, sees a tiny, inconspicuous drop well up against the steel and smudge against the shiny metal. She sniffs, then smacks her lips. “Smells nice.”

“You wanna seize me up and bite me yet?”

She laughs wryly: “Don’t say it like that. But I always wanna seize you up and bite you, just a little.”

Louis rolls her eyes, then draws her finger into her own mouth. “Why are you still standing there, don’t you wanna taste me?”

Obviously, she wants to. But she’s also relishing the ease that allows her to stay where she is, to keep inhaling, breath sped up yes, but not clogging her senses. “Wanna taste you all the time.”

There’s the split of a second where Louis’ jaw tightens, then she shrugs, picks up the knife again and enlarges the prick in her finger, a thin slash down the tip of it. And Harry realises the trust she has in her, and she’s okay, she’s fine, she’s composed, except she isn’t because she can’t look away and the harmony in her ears is a mix of Louis’ heartbeat, their breathing and white noise spreading through her own body.  Distantly she hears: “Huh, I really thought you’d be on me by now.”

It smells heavenly sweet. Fruity, kind of, or flowery, maybe, but it’s so faint and distant her only thought is to get more. Harry lets go of the chair, deliberately puts one foot in front of the other. With her looking down at Louis directly, merely warm puffs of air between them, the scent gets thicker. “Louis,” she begins again, careful not to school her features, not to mask the true emotions in them. “Would you please put the knife away?”

Louis blinks up at her, grin suddenly gone. “Oh damn, you really…Oh.”

“You sure?” she asks, she will do no more than Louis allows her to. Even though everything in her imposes her to clasp, to take, to suck. Then the knife is gone and Louis is holding up her hand, right under Harry’s nose, and Harry’s immediate reaction is to push her up against the counter. Then to seize her wrist. “Fuck. Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” The rhythm of Louis’ heartbeat has audibly sped up, and the scent of flowers gets thicker, palpable, but it’s not just because her blood is mere centimetres away from Harry’s mouth, it’s because Louis is getting wet, Harry can smell it on her, sees, as she quickly flits up her gaze, the dilation of her pupils, the glossy sheen of the blue in her eyes. And she can’t help but repeat: “You want this?”

In this second she craves nothing more than to put Louis in a state of cloudy ecstasy, wants to bury her fangs in Louis’ skin and take until Louis is writhing and gasping and begging to come.

“Of course I do. You’re so sweet.” It doesn’t make _sense_ , not when _sweet_ is something that can only describe the contrast of dark crimson against rough skin. Before she can argue, stars explode behind her eyes, _because Louis has pressed her fingertip against Harry’s lips_. “Want you to press me into the counter and suck my blood, and then I want to get you off, you okay with that?”

“Yes,” she whispers. The white noise wins and Harry acts without hesitancy, wraps her mouth around Louis’ finger and sucks. It’s barely there, a tiny puncture can hardly evoke a trickle, but it’s the second taste of warm, fresh, lush blood she’s had in ages, and it’s _Louis_ ’, this is Louis offering up a taste, control, herself.

“Fuck, how does that already feel nice, what the fuck,” Harry can perceive the strain in those words, can hear Louis’ heart going wild, and decides it has been long enough for her to wait. Letting go of Louis’ finger, she turns her delicate wrist in one hand, and presses her other palm to Louis’ pelvis, sneaking into the waistband of those soil stained shorts.

“Gonna make you feel good, make you come.”

“Have you already forgotten why we’re…”

Harry flashing her a look and bending to press a kiss to her pulse has the desired effect of delivering her thoughts. “Oh.” Beneath her lips she can feel the soft flow of life. As she steals the taste of skin through peppered kisses, her other hand inches lower, over the cotton of Louis’ underpants. Here too, warmth pools, muscles twitch. She waits. Hears the quiet. “Do it.”

Simultaneously, Harry slides her fangs into Louis’ wrist and her finger over Louis’ clit.

Louis’ lower body twitches closer, her arm freezes, and then she lets out the prettiest sound, a high, breathy _Oh_. And that _Oh_ turns into a choked off gasp as Harry begins to suck and press closer with her whole body, aligning their thighs, bumping their knees together. With the waves in which Louis’ blood streams onto her tongue, she draws circles over Louis’ clit, taking what’s hers, giving what is hers to give. It’s more than she has dared to fantasise, so real and absolute in its taste, and tears are threatening to overwhelm her as Louis’ trust takes form in gentle flavours of spring flowers and sugary darkness. It blooms in her mouth. 

Realising she has closed her eyes in blissful trance, she opens them and gets hit by the sight that are Louis’ pink lips, chapped from when both of them have nibbled on them, spots of flush covering her cheeks and clavicles and neck, her beautiful, slender neck bared as she tips her head back, exposes her carotid artery. “’s feels so fucking good, Harry, didn’t think it’d feel this good.”

Devastation clings to Louis’ voice, gulps of air shaking up her words. “Can you – with your hand –“

Harry adds pressure with the finger that is teasing around Louis’ clit, then slips it aside, along the seam of her boxers, briefly feels the dampness of the fabric, and then the pulsing wetness just when she slides into her. Louis whimpers, suddenly digging nails into Harry’s biceps. “More.”

She knows she should stop soon, doesn’t want to bring either of them to a point of dizziness, so she gaspingly lets go with her mouth, sucking the remaining liquid from her lips, then crooks her finger inside Louis, adds another one, pressing up up up against her rough walls. “You’re so wet, just from this.”

It comes out kind of questioningly, maybe because her mind is still fuzzy and her fangs are making it difficult to speak, and it makes Louis nod frantically. “Love your mouth.”

This – it’s shattering. It ruins every piece of her, it feels like her presence is fraying at the edges and she just _has to_ , she has to press a fleeting kiss to Louis’ lips, not smearing the blood onto her mouth, just a gentle caress. “Baby.”

Louis scowls. “The fuck was that, kiss me properly, you prick.”

“There’s still a little blood.”

Louis’ face twists prettily, Harry must’ve hit a right spot inside her, but her brows are still drawn. “You think I can’t handle a bit of blood?”

Overwhelmed she drives in another finger, to feel Louis seize up against her body, to feel her tremble, but also to distract herself from the heat in her abdomen. “When we’re finished, yeah?”

“I’ve tasted my own-“ Harry can’t handle this, her cunt can’t handle this, and certainly not her soul, her soul that had missed this beautiful, demanding blossom of passion, and strength and stubbornness for decades now and is latching onto her ferociously. So she speeds up, fucks into Louis with strong, forceful strokes, lays her free hand over her top and thumbs over her nipple, tugs on it. “Shush, be good.”

She almost laughs at the mix of incredulousness and exploding pleasure on Louis’ features, drinks in the way her eyes widen and mouth falls open, a thin sheen manifesting on her temples. “Unfair tactic.”

Now Harry does giggle. She leans into Louis, though, and hopes the sound of it against her ear is the cause for the tremor in her sides. “C’mon, you do want to be good for me, don’t you? Let me make you come.”

“Asshole,” Louis whispers, but a smile dances around her lips, and she closes her eyes, hanging onto Harry. Again, tears well up as she is once again hit with the level of trust Louis has in her, the openness that has brought them here, the obstacles, the willingness to come back to each other despite their past. She can still taste the pulse of blood on her tongue. “Louis. Sweetheart.”

“Mmh?” So breathy. So light.

“Thank you.”

Just a smile. A blinding, self-satisfied smile. “Wanted it for so long.”

“Me, too,” Harry chokes out. “Ever since you came back. Every time I look at you.”

“Look at me.”

She does. They look at each other, Louis’ body jostled with the force of Harry’s fingers, Harry’s curls in her eyes because she can’t bring herself to sort them out, to let go of the swell of Louis’ tits, of the shirt warming up between them. She doesn’t have to, Louis sweeps through her hair and scratches her scalp. “You’re stunning.”

Harry knows her lips must be at least carrying small remains of blood, her fangs are still slightly expanded, her eyes probably blown and holding an intense focus in them, and she’s looming over Louis, hiding her from the rest of the world, claiming her as hers. She knows she looks like the rawest version of herself. Fully exposed. Potentially lethal. And Louis looks at her with wonder.

A single tear falls down her cheek. Louis picks it up and puts it against her mouth.

A surge of blurred emotion is everything Harry can feel in this second. Her body almost detached, her mind a sea of swirls and currents. Louis kisses her. She doesn’t pull back. Their teeth clack against each other, their lips touch, and their tongues leave traces, spit slick between them. The taste of Louis’ mouth mixes with the remains of her blood, and Harry moans loud and deep. An answering keen makes her remember her fingers, so she shifts them again, slowly twisting them around, feeling her heat.

“Harry –. Harry?” There is a change in tone and it makes her draw back, lock their gazes.

“Yes?” A hard thrust with her fingers.

Louis’ eyes are watery. “Do I –“, a whimper, then a sudden stillness. “Do you like my taste?”

Harry’s connection to her body rushes back in. Just like that. She’s frozen in place, can barely keep her fingers moving. Her throat is still choked up. “Lou-“

“Do I taste good?”

She picks up her pace again, driving into Louis vehemently, applying force to her clit by rubbing it with her thumb, kisses her fleetingly before sweeping her fingers along her cheek. “Best I’ve ever tasted, Baby. Gonna keep you forever.”  
Louis pulses around Harry’s fingers, she’s coming quietly, wetness seeping down her wrist, head thrown back. She doesn’t stop fucking her, even after she has taken in a huge gulp of air, doesn’t stop driving her fingers in and out rapidly. Licks a stripe just below her ear: “Next time I’ll spread you out on my bed, hold you down and bite you here.”

Again, Louis’ cunt throbs again, keening sounds tumbling down her lips. “Want it.”

“I know you do,” Harry says, and sneaks down her other hand to switch up the pressure on Louis’ clit, presses patterns into her. “Want it, too. Want to fuck you all the time, taste you all the time, taste so sweet. Imagine if I bit you on your thigh, could alternate between licking and drinking you.”

Said thighs shiver against her own, heat building up in her own abdomen. She imagines sitting on Louis’ face, feeling her tongue in her and travelling her own over Louis’ slit, through her wetness, over a puncture on her hip, or on the soft give where her legs and torso meet. Unconsciously, she starts pressing up against Louis’ hipbone, rubbing herself slowly.

Louis hums. “Could make me take it.”

“You want that?”

“Yeah?”

“Wanna make you feel good.” The way her knuckles brush against Louis’ folds every time she pulls out rolls a wave of heat down her spine. It wraps around her skin, suffocating her and she’d do anything right now to come. “Baby, you wanna get me off now?”

“Don’t stop fucking me,” Louis demands, but her gaze is unfocused and her hands clumsily fumble with Harry’s fly, their arms knocking together. She just slightly swirls her fingers in answer.

Finally, her panties are exposed in the dim space between them. Fascinated, she watches as Louis’ small fingers tug at her pubic hair, how her hands lay against the lace, transfixed by the tiny wounds on her wrist, just a hint of red trickling down her caramel skin. She’s torn between wanting it against her fangs again, and needing some kind of relief against her own throbbing. “Will probably get one finger in me and I’ll come.”

A hint of a laugh is the first sign of Louis slowly coming back to herself. “So come.”

“Want to make you come again, before.”

“How ‘bout you bite my neck right now, and we both get to come.”

Harry nearly loses it right then. “Fuck,” she hisses, and drops forward, driving her face into Louis’ shoulder, and her fingers into her pussy. She won’t bite her neck, that’s too messy, too intimate for a kitchen counter, she wants silk sheets and candles for that, proper nakedness. But, she thinks as she tastes the sweat on Louis’ collarbones, a little nip right here wouldn’t do any harm. Just a sip. She opens her mouth to propose her thought, just as Louis presses two fingers into her, through the lace, through the panties, and it feels harsh and wonderful and it creates a tug on her clit, and she moans deep in her chest. It’s barely anything, Louis can’t get very deep, but the sensation of it, the roughness, such a stark contrast to Louis’ velvety skin under her lips, lets stars swim all around her.

Remembering her manners, she returns the pleasure, pounding in deep. Desperately, they push against each other, both muttering nonsense, Louis both a puddle and a force between her and the counter. Harry’s breath catches in her throat as three fingers finally sink into her, panties tucked aside, tugging into her arse but that doesn’t matter because Louis’ palm crowds against her clit and they’re both so, so wet, panting, moaning.

“Harry, please,” a shudder, “c’mon, I’m so close, make us come, bite me, please –“

Harry sinks into Louis. She doesn’t hit a direct vein or artery, but so much closer to Louis’ heart her blood sings with brightness. As it hits the first of her taste buds, Harry comes, crashing forward, trapping their arms between them, and either that or the tug of the blood makes Louis stiffen, gasp, cry out, cunt clenching down around Harry’s fingers a second time.

She can’t stop. Can’t stop thrusting her fingers, can’t stop drawing in the taste of blood. All she hears is a rapid heartbeat and rattling breaths. All she feels is soft skin, and wet skin, and the tightening of muscles. Maybe she comes again or she continues to come and maybe Louis shudders against her a third time, but right now all she can perceive is warm, spicy blood.  
  
Then a hand on her neck. A voice murmuring. “Harry, Love.”

It cuts through the haze. Stumbling back, shame fills up the space in her body that isn’t thrumming with energy. “Sorry-“, but the hand pulls her back in.

“No worries, I’m okay. Need to give us a break, tho.”  
They pant, puffs of air sticking against the sweat along her jaw, her own breaths playing with Louis’ hair, with a violet tucked behind her ear. Her whole body is vibrating, an overwhelming mixture of too much drive and exhaustion. “Thank you,” she whispers. “For reminding me to pull back.”

Louis’ hands press the slick back of her shirt against her spine. “I know you would’ve done it yourself. Was just about to fall down, ‘s all.”

She withdraws, checking the colour in Louis’ cheeks, the rhythm of her heartbeat. She goes to pluck the violet from her ear, then falters. Harry stares at her own fingers, wet with Louis, glistening. Taste of them almost as good as her blood. She forces her gaze on the wound on Louis’ shoulder. “Did I hurt you?”

“Only as much as it took to feel good.”

There’s no indicator for it being a lie, Harry still gently licks at the punctures, wills her saliva to work fast, to heal. It leaves a smear of red, blood soaking into the strap of Louis’ top. She pulls the fabric between her lips and sucks on it, relishing the remains of it. Louis’ soft laughter keeps her from falling into another haze. “You c’n keep it, ‘f you want. Like a nappy, for when you can’t sleep.”

Harry brushes a hand through her hair, violet falling down, lays a thumb below her half-lidded eyes. They’re still glassy

“Why would I need it, when I can just have you by my side?”

Louis blinks slowly, then lowers her gaze. “I -.” Doesn’t go on after Harry’s encouraging hum, then kisses her slowly. There is something reverent in it, something honest, and afterwards they stumble into the bedroom, getting rid of their clammy shirts, their sticky panties, clinging to each other, skin not able to cool down in their embrace.

Beside them, on the bedside table, the tiny buds of the plant begin to unfurl.

 

 

-*-

  


It’s quite a mundane day, really, the sun is only occasionally peeking out, hiding behind idle clouds, a sluggish heat makes every movement tiring, but it is nice to simply lay in the park, to rest. There is the sound of traffic, of course, and dozens of children running around, parents shouting after them, teenagers hooting. A few ducks by a small pond flutter their wings, occasionally quacking and sloshing up the water; bees reel from bough to bough, from a patch of cyclamen to a forsythia bush; dogs bark excitedly. The leftovers from their Capri Suns emit a candy sweet smell, orange aroma still sticky on her lips. Harry licks them and watches Louis stretch, back curving and arms above her head. They share a smile.

It’s been two weeks since Zayn collapsed, one week since her groaning about wanting to leave the hospital began, and six days since Harry had bit Louis for the first time. Three hours since she last bit her. The punctures are almost invisible, only two reddened marks by her neck.

“I’ve found a job,” Louis says unexpectedly. “It’s kinda. Permanent. I didn’t think they’d take me with my decades old degrees but apparently being a nymph and having first hand experiences helps, it’s, like, at a youth centre for Nymphs that come to the city for the first time.”    
Behind her, the park stretches towards the horizon, caged in by carefully trimmed hedges and bushes, buildings looming behind the trees.

Harry hums. “The one next to the botanical garden?”

“Yeah, how’d you know about that?”

She shrugs, turns onto her belly and cushions her chin on the back of her hands. “I kinda looked for you in every Nymph related place. Uhm, back then.”

Louis tilts her head up, their noses half a metre apart, another hum between them. “I’m sorry, Love,” she says, and strokes a curl behind Harry’s ear.

“Nah, it was kinda intense and a little creepy, anyway.” They chuckle and there’s no pain in Harry’s chest, no numb fog spreading in her insides, no exhaustion in her bones. Just deep contentment. “It feels better to know that you were, like, travelling, instead of fleeing to a shelter just to get away from me.”

“That’s…,” she frowns. “You make it sound like I was afraid of you. I was never afraid of you, just hella pissed off. But I guess I was kinda fleeing, not just from you, really, but like, the city. And from…”

Louis leans to her side on the blanket, and Harry thinks I would move out of the city for you. Louis laughs and scratches at the sweat pooled at the hollow of her knee, and Harry thinks I would move out of the city and live in the forest with you. Louis sinks her fingers into the grass, nails coming out dirty and smudged, the whole park seeming brighter and greener and Harry thinks I would move out of the city and live in the forest with you - if only you asked.

But that is not what Louis begins to say when she rolls onto her back, looking up at the sky and pressing her hands to her tummy, a bunch of grass and flowers between her fingers. “Remember when I told you that I don’t think love is for me?”

“When you believed the fucked up stereotype of nymphs only being good for sex, you mean?”

“Yeah,” comes the resigned answer. “I really kinda fled into that believe, you know, because it was easier than admitting I was hurt.”

“Hurt by me?”

Louis is not looking at Harry, instead fondly caressing a yarrow, a smile swirling around her pink mouth, hair ruffled from the wind and where Harry had gripped it just hours before. “A little, yeah. That person in France had something to do with it, too, a lot, probably. But... I know now, that I was suppressing pain from leaving you. From you drifting away.”

She swallows down a sob, picks up a blade of grass from Louis’ shirt and then travels her hand along its seam, over her soft skin. “Seems like we both were pretty fucked up, hm?”

“I think we’re allowed to be a little fucked up sometimes,” Louis says, smiling shyly. “Imagine being friends for a hundred years and always staying stagnant, what kinda boring ass shit.”

“It’s really been a hundred years…”, she breathes, shifting, pressing the tips of her fingers into the swell of Louis’ tummy, resting her head on her other hand.

Louis throws away the yarrow, then clears her throat. “Ninety-eight, actually.”

The only constant in her life has been Louis. Louis had always been either an arm's-length away or the shrill of a telephone or the wax-sealed envelope of a letter. A dove, even, for a year. Sure, there were times when Harry had to wait agonizing weeks because either of them had lived in a village removed from any functional transportation. But they would always find each other. They would always end up in each other’s arms. 

Even now, even after eight years of silence and before that years of superficial letters, of distorted sentences, and of words that hid true feelings. Their gazes meet and part, too close to properly look into each other’s eyes, squinting as the sun sends a bright light through the clouds.

Harry bends down to kiss her.

 

 

-*-

 

“How am I going to tell her?”

Harry had been longing for love all her life and there it was, quietly sitting behind her ribcage and giving her a nudge every time she looked at her best friend.

“I dunno,” Zayn says. She’s not wearing shades, dark eyes glinting in the midday sun. Nothing about her reveals that she’s spend the last two and a half weeks in a hospital bed, attached to tubes and at the mercy of stressed doctors, an even more stressed Niall, and the persistent nurses. “Wait for a special occasion and jump it on her. Like, I dunno. Somewhere.”

Niall snorts, stops to bring her lunch to her mouth. “Somewhere, Harry, don’t you know that? That’s from someone who asked me to marry her during sex.”

Zayn scowls at her, but her pouting lips are soon covered by Niall’s and the two stop being useless consultants. Harry huffs and stares past them at the buildings on the other side of the streets, roofing covered in dirt and pigeons. Maybe she’ll send a letter attached to a white dove, or stand outside the tower and cite a poem, or compose a song and get it on the radio if she really wants to have a try at being hip and cool. Those options require her to be patient, though, to wait for an answer instead of receiving one fast and definitive.

Harry tensely grips the glass of water on the table in thought of that answer. What if she’s been reading the signs all wrong; what if the hints she’s been receiving, Louis kissing her senseless as often as she can, Louis speaking about finding permanence in her job and in her home, Louis saying she feels safe when she with Harry; what if all those things have been fantasies?

 

 

-*-

 

 

The slope from Louis’ brow to her cheekbone is devastating. Completely unravelling. Harry can’t stop looking at the way the descending sun flushes it a golden orange, can’t stop imagining her lips against the soft slant of it. But Louis is all the way over there, sitting on the windowsill, one leg dangling down the side of the tower, the other at the mercy of her own art: sharpie doodles. And Harry is all the way over here, unable to stop her from ruining the glow of her skin with poisonous felt-tip, unable to put her mouth all over her.

“Louis. Louis.”

“Wha’?” comes as a reply, but Louis doesn’t look up. Her spine bends elegantly as she stretches to draw across her ankle.

“Would you care to join me on this very comfortable armchair?”

Now Louis looks up. One of those devastating brows raised. “There’s no space left. Also, I can see the sunset from here.”  
The latter is a very valid argument. If Louis’d move over here, her skin wouldn’t shine nearly as warm and golden. But still…

“You can sit on my lap. Or, or the armrest,” she is quick to add, after another one of those raised-eyebrow looks.

“You’re so needy.”

  
The sky behind her is smudged, like someone dipped their finger in pink and then streaked it across a shy blue, such delicate colours as a background for such a delicate, persistent person. Few thin hairs stand up at the back of Louis’ neck, her profile almost a silhouette now that Harry’s lids droop and the beams of the sun blur the edges and cushions of her face.

“You’re very cold to me.” Harry knows she’s sulking. Knows she’s probably annoying, but her chest still aches, and her fingertips yearn for a trace, and she just knows she’ll feel better if she gets to touch Louis’ skin. The skin that is currently being demolished by black lines. “What’re you even drawing?”

Louis sticks out her leg, shrugging. It’s sexy. Very sexy. So sexy. “Just swirls, and flowers, and swallows.”

It’s just birds, really, barely distinguishable as those among the scribbles. _“Little Swallow,”_ she murmurs. _“You have stayed too long here; but you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you.”_

Louis let’s out a short laugh. “You’re a horny sap.”

“That was Oscar Wilde.”

“Who was also a horny sap.”

“Dolly was so great at impersonating him. I miss her so much.”

The sound of a cap on a sharpie rings out. “I visited her grave, last summer.”

“Oh.” Harry is proper sad now. Just wants to curl up and cry. And maybe kiss Louis a bit.

She has been doing that so often lately her lips feel heavy with the loss of a weight against them, memory of kisses and the direct sight of Louis’ mouth never enough of a supplement for actually tasting her. Tasting her spit, her sweat, her slick. Her blood. Harry suppresses a moan, letting out a pitiful huff instead. A few more as it gets no reaction. Fine. She shall not make a sound until Louis has stopped fondling the leaves of a tulip and acknowledges her, shall not sigh or groan or sulk until she’ll step around the lavender bushes and the white tree and kisses her, shall not say a word until the sun has set and the moon turns the green of the plants into hues of grey.

“You know,” that short laugh again. It sounds a bit dry. “If I didn’t know better I’d think you just confessed your love to me.”

Well. She shifts in the armchair, inhales. And says: “I do love you, Louis.”

“Fuck, Harry.” Suddenly, Louis is standing. Suddenly, her whole body is a silhouette against the pinkening sky, her curves swaying as she tips closer, around the lavender, brushes the tree, throws a shadow over the violets. “You can’t – you can’t say that shit.”

“And why not?”

Harry can see every little crinkle in Louis’ lips, can see the spot above the dip of the top one where a tiny red bloom recalls a previous kiss. Those sweet lips curl. “Because I might think you’re saying the truth.” And for the third time, that laugh. The right corner of Louis’ mouth is twisted downwards.

“I am,” she says.

Louis sighs as if she’s speaking to a child, and sits down in Harry’s lap. “Okay, I love you, too. Best friends forever.”

Her hands automatically come up to rest on the small of her back, fingers stroking idly. “I’m in love with you.”

A single tear wells up in Louis’ left eye. “Why are you doing this?”

“Why won’t you believe me?”

“Because,” the sun now sets the edges of her face ablaze, “What if you’re wrong? What if you only think you’re in love? We haven’t known each other for thirty years.”

A violent force seems to wrap around Harry’s throat. “I want to spend the rest of my life getting to know everything you want to let me know - that I haven’t learned in the decades we knew each other, and in the months you have been back, and I, I want you to have your own corners of yourself and hide in them whenever you want, but I want to be with you, waiting for you to come back. I will always wait for you to come back. I love you. I do.”

  
Louis bites her own lip. Sharp. And, genuinely, it’s a reflex, an instinct, Harry doesn’t contemplate her next move, just tips them right off the chair, onto the floor, cowering over Louis’ body. The pink sunbeams have been replaced by riveting red. She had slid her arms around Louis’ back, an unconscious move to shield her from pain, but it must still smart because Louis hisses loudly, grimaces. “Fuck, fuck – fuck you, kiss me you fucking idiot.”

Again, Harry can’t talk. Her nails now dig into the soil, tiny cobbles prodding into her palms, every muscles locked up, for this is all she can do to prevent herself from pouncing on Louis right now, from tipping her head back and sucking on the drips of blood forming on her lip, from sinking her fangs into her neck, from pressing her down and giving and giving and giving. She doesn’t dare to inhale. But she can see the pulse beneath Louis’ skin, can see its rapid stretch and strain, a beautiful, beautiful rhythm.

“This is what gets you to shut up, hm? You’re that desperate for my blood?”

Harry wants to spend her life staring at Louis’ pulse and hearing her mock her. “Desperate for all of you.”

Louis surges up to meet her in a bruising kiss. The blood immediately spreads onto Harry’s tongue, taste so sweet and strong her mind goes cloudy for a few seconds. Then she exhales forcibly, and sits back on her haunches.  “I’m not gonna bite you.”

“Aren’t you?”

She laughs, despite her despair. “No, no ‘m not. Not before you believe me.”

Louis stares at her. Mouth set agape, lips rosy, body illuminated by the last remains of light filtering through the branches of the white tree, all her arcs and tilts so lovely against the bursts of colours around her. “You haven’t been in love since Vivien.”

“I spend the last thirty years wallowing in self-pity because I didn’t have you by my side. I think that counts, at least a bit, as love. As something originating from love. But yeah, I guess it also doesn’t really count. I haven’t been in love with anyone and then you came back, and now I’m like… really fucking much in love with you.”

She can’t see Louis’ expression, her reaction, because she suddenly hides her face behind her arms, shirt riding up on her tummy. But her shoulders are shaking, and her breaths have turned hurried. “Louis?” she asks quietly. “I really am saying the truth.”

Birds are chirping outside the tower. And children are playing tag somewhere nearby, high shrieks echoing through the park. No noisy rushing cars or shrilling sirens or honking trucks, no ticking of traffic lights, no rattling as tires rumple over holes in the streets. It’s crying, what she’s hearing. Soft sobs, shy sniffs. When she gently pries away the limbs from Louis’ face, palms trailing up her inner biceps, her throat tightens with the sight of tears streaming over her cheeks, down her jaw.

“I’m in love with you, too,” Louis says and Harry’s chest seems to expand with a wave of pressure. Her lips begin to tremble, too, and then they’re both crying, crying together like they’ve done many times, for many different reasons, many of them sad and painful, many of them beautiful, fulfilling, astonishing, but never as overpowering at this. She sits down on Louis lap with a shaky exhale, presses the side of her hands to the space below her eyes, sucks on her own lower lip.

“I -, I’m,” she starts. Blinks away the tears, grins. “Really?”

 “ _Really?”_ It’s repeated so teasingly, with a tilt in Louis’ mouth, with a sparkle in her eyes, with a touch to her waist.

“Are you –.” And again she struggles, but Louis is smiling, smiling so blindingly, and it mirrors in Harry, she feels giddy with bliss. “I can’t believe you’re not mocking me for the romance.”

Louis lowers her lashes for a split second, licks her lips. “I love me some romance.”

Harry wants to _show_ her romance. Twirl her under the stars. Kiss her in a lush forest. Fuck her during a meteor shower.

A gentle blink, a tender tug in the corners of Louis’ blushed mouth. Is it too soon to kiss her? It never is. The flora around them keeps whispering in the wind, and the sun has now set and the moon is dimmed through the leaves, and the smell is intoxicating, and the thrum of a heart, despite her attempts to stay calm and ignore it, makes her limbs shake. She looks down onto Louis, graceful, dainty Louis whose heart just audibly skipped a beat, and tilts her head. “You gonna let me be romantic now?” and she makes her voice sound coated and raspy, darts out her tongue.

“Mmmh,” Louis makes, _mmmh, mmmh, mmmh_ , it halls in Harry’s head, in all kinds of tints and tilts.

The fingers by her waist sneak under her shirt, make her shiver and bend down, curls falling into her eyes before they’re brushed away affectionately. Just a few breathes, just a few spaces between their mouths, and then she will _taste_ her, the awaiting drop of blood, taste her spark, and life, and flush. She can almost feel the spit softness of lips against hers, before Louis pulls back. “You were wrong.”

“What?”, she mumbles, slowing blinking her eyes open again.

“You chose the wrong quote,” Louis sighs out a small laugh, the huff of it pushing against Harry’s skin. “I haven’t stayed too long. I didn’t stay long enough.” Harry opens her mouth to protest, but Louis shushes her, continues. “But I chose to stay now, and I choose to keep you in this little garden of mine, and I choose to be with you as long as you’ll have me.”

They kiss, the scent of violets all around them, Harry’s eyes falling close again, golden light burning through her lids, golden skin soft beneath her fingers, golden praise sweet on her lips.

 

                                   

-*-*-*-

 

 

In front of her, water lilies float on an expanding lake, white blossoms welcoming little insects, distributing a quiet scent. Behind her, Louis’ leaves rustle in the wind. She rounds a third of the lake, trudging towards Liam’s figure. They’re wearing a maroon sweater, obnoxious pants and yellow wellies, seemingly joyful about squelching the sludge of rotten grass and faded leaves beneath their feet, last remains of the cold winter. Harry avoids getting dirty by coming to stop a few metres away, grin tugging at her cheeks. “Local fifty year old Vampire on the loose, has, uhm, fun with mud.”

“At least I’m not a tree hugger,” they immediately retort.

Harry squints her eyes. “You’ve been waiting to say that since Louis and I left, didn’t you.”

Liam laughs, stepping onto a dryer patch of earth and winks at her. “I’ve been waiting to say that since I met Louis. Is it not extremely weird to see her in another body?”

Harry smirks, eyeing their hair that is now long enough for a cheeky quiff, their glittering lipstick. “I’ve died and come back, there’s nothing that weirds me out anymore, Li.”

“Yah, I mean, same but. But you don’t wanna fuck her in tree form, right?”

“Jesus Christ,” she exclaims and kicks up a good amount of mud, getting some splodges onto Liam’s outfit. “The fuck’s wrong with you, no I don’t. Can you ever not think about sex?”

They let out a long, suffering sigh, hiding it behind their tattooed wrist. “I still haven’t found a soulmate to fuck every morning, please acknowledge your privilege.”

Harry sends them a look, and turns to trail towards their backpacks, set on putting the tea bags into the cups before Louis is back. “You still only looking in clubs for that someone?”

“I’ve expanded my search to bookclubs, fitness centres and shopping malls.”

“Smart thinking,” she says, and gets out the thermos flask, pressing two cups into Liam’s hands. The hot water steams once it’s exposed to the air, crisp morning cold taking its time to welcome spring.

They clear their throat, clunking the cups together. “I’m really happy for you two, you know that, right? It makes me so… it’s really nice to see. Tho, I still think about that dinner, I’m still scarred by combing back into the room and seeing you both dry humping. Can’t believe it took Niall, Zayn _and_ me to get your attention.”

She laughs, screwing the lid back on the flask. “At least I wasn’t sucking her yet, you wouldn’t’ve got us to part.”

“Really?”, and there’s genuine concern in Liam’s voice, bushy brows coming together.

“Oh, no, it’s not like that,” she says softly. “It hasn’t been like that since that one low in October, I promise. My therapist can promise it, too,” she laughs again, inhaling the scent of the tea, ginger and lemon and myrtle. “We’re okay.”

Their painted lips curve into a smile, expression full of tenderness. “You are?”

Far away, Harry can hear slow footsteps. And soft humming, a familiar song, a melody they used to sing when they met. “Yeah. We are.”

 

 

-*-

 

 

Before she can step through, the door falls shut. She huffs down a laugh, then pushes against the heavy wood, putting her back into it. Inside the church it is quiet, air seemingly expanding into the arches of the ceiling, whispers of distinct memories curling around the columns, stone tiles emitting a cool echo. Inhaling the smell of daffodils by the entrance, the hint of wine and sweat, she walks along the back rows of low benches, takes a turn into a side room. The elevator leading up to the top of the tower is closed due to repair, torn post-it apologising for the discomfort. She’ll have to take the stairs.

 

 

-*-

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much! I'd appreciate some feedback and eventual trigger warnings I forgot. tumblr is @pattern-pals <3


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